Work Forces

Allison Gerber, Vice President of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Center for Economic Opportunity, discusses what it takes to expand economic opportunity for young people and families, and why so many existing programs and systems fall short. Allison walks through the Center's three interconnected bodies of work around education and employment, income stability, and financial health, and explains why the pandemic forced a reckoning with how these strategies had long operated in silos. She shares striking data on young parents, roughly 9 million people ages 16 to 30 in the United States, most of whom are working but not getting ahead, and explores what it would take to design education and workforce systems around the reality of their lives. The conversation explores the promising role of community colleges as a connective tissue across these systems, the potential of technology and predictive analytics to reach struggling students before they disengage, and what educators, employers, and policymakers can each do to become true forces in expanding opportunity for young people and families.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so, with that, let's dive in. Julian, in our work and on this podcast, we talk a lot about what economic mobility truly requires. Access to a quality job or a training program is one piece of the puzzle, but to build financial stability over time, young people and families need more holistic and sustained support. And the more we dig into this, the clearer it becomes that many existing programs and related systems were not originally designed with that holistic approach in mind.

Julian Alssid: And the stakes get even higher when you add parenting into the picture. The data is striking. It's very difficult for young people who are raising children to get ahead economically. There's just not enough time in the day for students who are also parents, and the pathways we have built rarely account for that reality.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We are looking forward to digging into these challenges and possible ways forward in today's conversation. In this episode, we're speaking with Allison Gerber, Vice President of the Annie E. Casey Foundation Center for Economic Opportunity. Allison leads efforts to create pathways to financial stability and economic mobility for children, youth, and families across the United States. Before joining the Casey Foundation, Allison served as Executive Director of the District of Columbia's Workforce Investment Council and as a Senior Associate with the Aspen Institute's Workforce Strategies Initiative. Allison, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us today.

Allison Gerber: Well, thank you both for having me. I'm so glad to be here.

Julian Alssid: Yes, Allison, it is great to have you here. So, if you will, in your own words, tell us about your background and the path that led you to your current role at the Casey Foundation.

Allison Gerber: Absolutely. I mean, no good conversation around a career pathway would be good if we don't talk about our own career pathways, right?

Julian Alssid: Exactly.

Allison Gerber: So, I've spent my career working at the intersection of education, employment, and other sort of levers for economic opportunity. I went to law school and have worked very little as a lawyer over the course of my career, which I think is interesting when we think about young people and how their education sets them up for their future job path. But I, as you said, Kaitlin, I come to this work from several different vantage points, including program management, research and evaluation, local government, and now philanthropy. My first job in workforce development was for a national nonprofit that prepared job seekers for registered apprenticeship in construction, and then from there I went to work on research and leadership development. Led the public workforce system in D.C. and now I'm here as a grant maker at the Casey Foundation. I've been at the Casey Foundation since 2013, and I've held three different roles for the foundation. First, as a Senior Program Officer, doing a lot of grant making around education and employment. Then, leading our education and employment team, and now as the Vice President for the Center for Economic Opportunity. And so, over that time, my work has touched on a range of strategies that support economic opportunity for young people and their families. So, thinking about youth apprenticeship, sector-based workforce strategies, childcare, and other supports for working families, debt, entrepreneurship, and a variety of levers.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So, we're looking forward to diving in with a discussion of some of those levers today. As we get going, we'd love if you could give us an overview of the Center for Economic Opportunity and the work the foundation is doing to expand economic opportunity for young people and families.

Allison Gerber: As you may know, the Annie E. Casey Foundation's mission is to create a brighter future for young people in the United States, and in the Center for Economic Opportunity, our contribution to that mission is really around helping young people and their families achieve their education, employment, and financial goals, and to do that by changing the programs and the systems that can make it harder to reach those goals. We have a particular focus at the foundation. About 50% of our work in grant making is focused on young people who are disconnected or at risk of disconnection from school to work. We see these as the young people who are probably furthest from opportunity, and might include young people who've had experience in juvenile justice or child welfare, have experienced homelessness, or otherwise their intersections of where they grew up or how they grew up just made it a little bit harder to access the programs and services that are helping them get on a career pathway. And we see adolescence as a really critical window into which we can help young people. I think there's increasing awareness that following toddlerhood, adolescence is the second very large window of development that we all go through on our way to adulthood, and so this is a particular period in which we can really put a lot of support and investment around young people to help them get on a strong pathway towards adulthood. And at the same time, as you mentioned in your introductions, our current policies and practices and systems haven't really kept pace with the reality of the lives that they're experiencing as they seek to navigate education and the economy. And so, really trying to think about how we modernize those opportunities.

Julian Alssid: So, you've done some research with the Urban Institute on young parents, and that paints a pretty striking picture of how difficult it is for people to achieve economic mobility when they're parenting at a young age. Can you speak to us a bit about what the data show, and then what are the implications for how we design education and workforce systems?

Allison Gerber: Yeah, absolutely. So let me back up a little bit and say just a little bit more about how we approach our work, and then how we think about the ways that parents fit in. So we have three main bodies of work in the Center for Economic Opportunity. The first is around education and employment, so really helping young people get the skills and work experiences that they need to have family-sustaining careers, and we really ground it in that family-sustaining careers. And then the second is thinking about the income, the stability of the income, and the supports available to families. So making sure that young people's basic needs are met, things like food and housing, and that they have the support they need to pursue their education and career, and so that also includes something like childcare when you think about young parents. And then the third is really around thinking about the financial health and asset building for young people and families. So helping young people manage debt, access fair financial products, save, and hopefully begin building assets that contribute to long-term financial goals and set their children up for success. And so, as we think about those bodies of work over the last year or so, we sought to do a deeper dive into understanding how these three pieces are intersecting in the lives of young parents, and I think this work at some level was sort of deeply emotional to me because it forced me to confront a lot of what I think I know about economic mobility in our country. And I think what we saw is that young parents are working, but they're not getting ahead. And when you compare them to young people at the same age, let's say 22, 23, 24, who aren't parenting, parents are much less likely to experience economic mobility, and that's kind of hard to stomach. So if you look at the numbers, there are about 9 million parents ages 16 to 30 in the United States. 7 million of them are working. So it isn't that they're not doing the things that they need to do to support their family. They are. At the same time, we see that less than three in 10 workers who are 18 to 24 have a job that gives them a family-supporting wage, that provides full-time work, that has benefits like health care, 401k, and all those things, let alone opportunities for skill building or advancement at work, and young parents are much less likely to have jobs with those features. And so if you think about what that means, it means young people early on in their trajectories, in their mid to late 20s, parents and non-parents begin to diverge. Non-parents are much more likely to be able to move into higher-paying, more stable work, and young parents are more likely to remain in lower-paying jobs with fewer opportunities. And so I'll say one more piece about this, and this will be no surprise to anybody who's parenting, is time. Our young parents are balancing work, caregiving, running a household. Childcare might be expensive, unavailable, incompatible with their schedule. Many grandparents and other relatives and family and friends are helping care for kids, but those supports can be unstable because other people are pitching in as they can, and so it's very hard to be going to school and working, which are the two things you kind of have to be doing to get ahead, and also care for your children in a high quality and stable manner, which is the thing that all parents want to do, right? And so they start to experience that tension really early on, and it's very hard to get out of that box.

Julian Alssid: Are there, in the research, are you finding any opportunities or pathways for young parents that are sort of higher yield?

Allison Gerber: Some of the work that has felt strong and increasingly strong over the last, let's say, 10 years has been work focused on student parents. So, working with community colleges to think about how campus supports, schedules, even things like co-location of childcare can better support parents. And I think last month was Student Parent Month, and it was interesting because it's really become a movement. It has gone from being a sort of small conversation that a subset of people are having on campuses to, particularly on community college campuses, a realization that the majority of their students are parenting, and that we really need to think about something beyond go back to school at night with your extra time, and that we think about flexible, better connected education that has childcare and basic needs supports and financial assistance, and that feels like a bright spot.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I think you're starting to head in this direction, Allison. But going back to what you mentioned around those three big themes of your work around education and employment, and stability around food and housing security, and then the financial health and asset building work, how do you see those three buckets or themes tying together? And so far as which levers are most effective to pull around some of these findings?

Allison Gerber: So let me say what I think is, to be asset based, an opportunity for improvement. As we think about young parents, is really to focus more on what happens at work, to think about the structure of work. So things like predictable schedules, paid leave, flexible arrangements, benefits provided at work, childcare supports, and really opportunities for training and advancement on the job, and weaving in all three of those pieces into the work day and the work lives of parents, so that advancement can happen during the work day and not just after work.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Right, and that addresses that key piece of time and when do we possibly fit that upskilling or additional training in when you're at work all day and then have a whole other set of responsibilities once you leave. That makes so much sense. You did mention community colleges having a central role in this work. Would love to expand the conversation a little bit to talk about community colleges as a central focus of your work, and how do you see that fitting within your center's core focus areas?

Allison Gerber: So just to back up and give a little history of where we've been and where we are now. Our grant making in the center has involved community colleges in some form or fashion for a long time. But historically, the three parts of the center that I mentioned have engaged in partnerships and support for community colleges in different ways. So, as we talked about, education and employment, really working with colleges on career pathways and high quality credentialing opportunities that are aligned with the labor market, and our work with student parents and our support for basic needs really being focused on building out access to food, transportation, childcare, and other student supports on campus, and then our financial health work was looking at affordability and debt, and so thinking about the two sides of the coin around how do people currently make enough income so that they can afford to be in school, and how do they go to school in a way that doesn't impact their future financial picture. And sometime, and it was really during the early days of the pandemic, when we saw young people dropping out of colleges in high numbers because of the tension of managing all of these things, we found ourselves asking a question that we probably should have asked a long time before: why are these portfolios treating these as separate strategies when the opportunities and challenges are experienced by the same student? And so that really changed how we started to think about the ways that we wanted to support community colleges through our grant making, the ways that we wanted to partner with colleges, and like for me, I think about it — I do come out of that career pathway side of the house, and so I had to start thinking about: okay, one thing we know colleges have done a lot of really strong work on over the last two decades is healthcare pathways. I think we can all point to hundreds of really strong healthcare pathways that are helping young people prepare for a variety of jobs, but if you have to participate in a clinical placement as a part of that program, whether it be for nursing or for rad tech or whatever, you're going to be required to probably give up or adjust your work schedule several hours a week over multiple weeks every semester, depending on the length of your program, for multiple years, and the truth is that most entry level jobs students are working in don't offer that kind of flexibility, and that immediately makes that very good pathway unaffordable and inaccessible for that student. And that just seems like, well, what's the point of building all of these things if the young people that we want to access them structurally can't, and so that had us start thinking about how do we bring the career pathways, the student supports, and the strategies that address the indirect and the direct costs of attending college into the same grant making strategy, and thinking about does that improve persistence? Does that improve credential attainment? Does that improve access to well-paying careers?

Julian Alssid: Allison, are there community colleges that you can point to now that you think are effectively weaving together what you all have in mind for the community college work?

Allison Gerber: There are definitely community colleges, and I bet we would all name a handful of really well-known community colleges, and I think the challenge in that is it's not clear that it's widely available, and it's not clear that all colleges have the kind of supports and strategies in place that they need to provide those supports to students. And so I'm hesitant to call out the high flyers because I think they get called out a lot, and what I'd love to see is there being too many to name. Some of the landscaping we've been doing has shown that what we've seen, which I think is a real positive, is that many colleges have the pieces in place in each of these three domains that they need, but they need help connecting them more intentionally. So they probably have, as we talked about, a set of terrific healthcare career pathways, and maybe they have a range of student supports, and they invariably have a financial aid office. It's challenging for students though because those offerings don't sit side by side and operate within a coherent system. They sort of have to go from one to the other and piece it together. And so we've seen colleges trying to take different strategies to address that. So thinking about is there a centralized place where students can access supports? And I think we have a history of investing in more physical centralized places through our Center for Working Families. But what we're starting to ask is, does that need to be physical? Can that be virtual? What does technology enable that it never did before? And relatedly, how can colleges use their own institutional data to maybe get ahead of folks even needing to come to the virtual or the real place, to pinpoint when a student is starting to struggle and to target those interventions to them in real time through things like predictive analytics and other strategies that might modernize that holistic one-stop approach. And so I think that's the opportunity. It's not that some of these things don't exist and colleges don't have a lot of really great things happening, and I don't want to be the next person to pile on and say that instructors should do more or colleges should do more, knowing that they're constrained, and they can't be everything to every student. But are there ways that we can help connect good things that they're already doing that allow them to deliver a little more efficiently, a little more effectively?

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I really appreciate you bringing up the use of technology as part of this landscape and thinking about where to leverage technology and existing, like you said, predictive analytics to help with maybe reaching a learner before they say, I actually can't show up to this class anymore, it's just a step too far right now, and then balancing that with when is the moment when you need the in-person, on-campus support. It's a complicated balance but I think more and more the answer seems to be somewhere in there, and maybe it's different for different colleges as well, right? There's not going to be one exact right approach, but maybe the magic is in some combination of those different services and supports.

Allison Gerber: And maybe the magic is in figuring out, I guess, what the researchers would call dosage, right? What is the right combination of those supports? Not just for the college, but can they calibrate it to the learner? And what would it take to be able to do that? Does technology enable that calibration? Is it allowing us to better understand where learners are? And we've seen this in our benefits access work. We've done some work to really support the uptake of food nutrition programs, SNAP on college campuses, and a technological front door can be a great way of helping a student navigate the complexity of applying for a program, the documentation that's required, verifying their income, verifying their identity. But sometimes they need help getting to that front door through a navigator who says, you know, it's okay to access this program. This is what it's here for. You shouldn't feel embarrassed. You shouldn't feel like you're taking something from somebody else by accessing it, and kind of helping people overcome that first step of asking for help, or furthering the process when it gets complicated. And some of these public programs are complicated, even when we really want to provide the support, and helping people understand, oh, I got a notice and it says I'm not eligible. What happened, and what can I do to back up in this process, and can I address that mistake? And so I think that combination and that timing is really important.

Julian Alssid: Well, I think this is a good lead into a question that we ask all of our guests, and given that our podcast is called Work Forces, Allison, what would you recommend to our audience of educators, employers, or policymakers who want to become forces in expanding economic opportunity for young people and families?

Allison Gerber: I love this question, and I love this play on forces. So thank you so much for asking it. It feels really fun, right? It lets us all think about how we can make a difference in the world. So, I think part of the challenge in this discussion is for all of us to think about how we design around the lives of students and young workers. Many students are workers, many are also caregivers or parents, and so I think just to break it down into a couple of your audiences, for educators, I think that's around building flexible pathways that connect school and work. I think that's about finding ways to make work-based learning paid. I think that's about bringing food, transportation, housing, and childcare into core offerings on campuses in a way that really intermingles it with the career pathway, rather than it being an add-on to an academic offering. For employers, we really want to encourage employers to think beyond recruitment and to think about retention and advancement, and ask themselves: Can workers see and access the next step within your company? Is there clarity? Is there transparency about that? Do your scheduling practices, your benefits, your frontline supervision make it easier for workers to take that step? Are you doing everything you can to make it seamless in your company? And then for parents in particular, thinking about predictable scheduling, flexibility, childcare support — are those things available to really help somebody climb within a company? And then I think the biggest sort of lift of all is for policymakers: can they make these systems connect? So many systems, right? Education, workforce development and training, public benefits, childcare, financial aid, all of them administered through different agencies and different funding streams. And I often think about it like that game we played as kids, like where you bounce the ball and you pick up a jack — why do young people have to keep bouncing the ball and pick up each of these jacks separately? Can they experience all of these opportunities all at once? And so, simplifying those access points that help people stay connected to school and work. And then, lastly, because I love this question so much I had so many different answers to it, I think for all of us it is to listen to and talk to young people. They're navigating so much change in technology and work and education. The cost of living is rising, and when I really try to put myself in their shoes, I realize that the life that a 20-something is leading looks so different than the life I led as a 20-something, and however well intentioned I might be, I don't have that experience. And I think sometimes it results in these negative narratives about young people and whether they want to work or they're good workers, and I think if we stop comparing them to ourselves and really accepted that their lives are very different, we might find ourselves really thinking about what our institutions look like if we design for them in a way that would benefit everybody.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for bringing us back to who are the learners, right, and what are their stories, and how can we seek to learn and evolve and change and grow based on what needs look like today and moving forward. As we wind down our conversation today, Allison, how can our listeners learn more about your work and follow what the Annie E. Casey Foundation is doing in this space?

Allison Gerber: I would say please visit our website. It's www.aecf.org, and on our website, you can sign up for what we call e-news or e-newsletters. There's one for economic opportunity, and through that newsletter, we're trying to push out stories of young people, stories of programs and practitioners who are working with young people, sometimes some research, sometimes some data. We wouldn't be the Annie E. Casey Foundation without the data and thinking about our Kids Count work, but really highlighting those voices of young people and practitioners and the lessons that work suggests for all of us.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Allison. It's been a great discussion. I'm sure our listeners will enjoy it, as I know we have, and we look forward to being in touch and continuing to follow your important work.

Allison Gerber: Well, thank you both for the opportunity. This was a really fun conversation. I particularly loved the how do we be a force for good question, and really appreciated the opportunity to engage with you both.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you for joining us. We appreciate this dialog. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Work Forces Consulting, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Dane Linn, Senior Vice President at Business Roundtable, discusses what it takes to move employer investment in workers from aspiration to execution on behalf of some of the largest employers in the country. Dane shares what BRT member CEOs consistently say will determine their success or failure as companies: not whether workers have the right credentials, but whether they have the right skills. He walks through the three interconnected goals of Business Roundtable's Corporate Initiatives Group: increasing labor force participation, aligning education and training with employer needs, and scaling what works. Dane makes the case that aspiration without execution does not lead to results. The conversation explores how AI is raising the value of human skills like judgment, critical thinking, and creativity rather than simply eliminating jobs, and what it means for companies to treat AI as a human capital challenge rather than a challenge of technology implementation. Dane also addresses the most critical federal and state policy levers needed to support workers through this transition, why the policy job is to build a sustainable infrastructure rather than create new programs, and what employers, educators, and policymakers can each do to become true forces in expanding economic opportunity for workers.

Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so, with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: One of the questions we come back to in our work is where corporate America stands when it comes to workforce development. The commitments are real, the rhetoric is strong, and yet the gap between what gets announced in a press release, and what actually changes in workers' lives can be significant. Today, we want to go right at that question.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's right, and it's a particularly important moment to be asking this question between the rapid pace of AI-driven change in the labor market, shifts in federal workforce policy, and real questions about how large employers are hiring and investing in workers, the stakes for developing quality workforce development opportunities, and more and more of them, have never been higher.

Julian Alssid: Which brings us to our guest today. Dane Linn is Senior Vice President at Business Roundtable, where he leads the organization's workforce development and education initiatives on behalf of some of the largest employers in the country. Before joining BRT, Dane served as Executive Director of State Policy at the College Board. He also spent many years at the National Governors Association, which is where I think we first met, Dane, where he worked at the intersection of education, workforce, and economic policy. Dane, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us.

Dane Linn: Thanks for having me.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So, Dane, thank you for being here. As we get started, we would love to give you the opportunity to tell us a bit more about your background and the path that led to your current role at Business Roundtable.

Dane Linn: Well, you heard a little bit about my background from Julian, but way before I got involved in state policy, I started out as a classroom teacher and an elementary school principal. But I got the bug for what could I do beyond the classroom to affect change, and that's where state policy came into play. And I worked at a state education agency, and as Julian noted, I worked with governors on a range of issues, education, workforce, and many others that I never anticipated getting engaged in, like Medicare, before I made the switch over to BRT. But the thing, the one thing that has remained constant in all of my experiences is remembering where I came from. I, after college, I moved to the southernmost tip of West Virginia. Some might say the heart of Appalachia, and learned about the challenges of that area. But the people, the great people of the state of West Virginia, and those experiences have heavily influenced my approach to policy and the programmatic work that we're going to talk about on today's call.

Julian Alssid: So we know you recently had your CEO Workforce Forum, so hot off the press. How are the BRT member CEOs thinking about their role in workforce development and economic mobility?

Dane Linn: That's a great question. Workforce is clearly getting more and more attention among the CEOs, and we're going to dive into that a little bit deeper throughout this conversation. But when we survey CEOs on what's going to determine their success or failure as a company, it's consistent. Finding workers with the right skills, not necessarily whether or not they have the right paper, the right credential, but the right skills. In addition to that, I would say the knowledge, attitude, behaviors, and skills. It's a combination of all of those. In 2023, the CEOs decided that we would start what's known as the Corporate Initiatives Group, and the intent behind what we call CIG is really to help member companies become better and smarter employers in a rapidly changing world. There are three interconnected goals if you think about the work that we do as part of the Corporate Initiatives Group, one is increasing labor force participation and getting more people into good jobs by removing the structural barriers that lock too many Americans out of the market. This is particularly true for young men. We've all seen the data on men in the workforce, but on labor force participation, one of the things I'm most encouraged by is that, among large companies in this country, nearly one and a half million Americans enter the middle class each year as a result of the investments in workforce, and about 124,000 of those workers without a bachelor's degree move into the middle class each year, just at BRT member companies. The second goal of our work is around aligning education and training with employers' needs. We do a lot of work in partnership with, for example, community colleges, and I'll talk more about that a little bit later. But it doesn't do any good for a community college, as the example, to create a program that they think responds to what employers need, only to find out that the employers tell them the individuals that graduated from your program, a two-year associate's degree program don't have the skills. We're really working to ensure that the education and training investments that not only our companies are making, but the investments that the training providers are making, flow toward jobs that exist and are in demand. Again, it doesn't do any good to get training for where there's no market. The last is scale, and you'll hear me talk about this probably more than you want me to. I don't think we need more boutiques, as I call them. We need solutions that affect not just hundreds but thousands of individuals. So, how do we, for example, scale work-based learning, and you'll see a report on our website that lays out what companies are doing to create the vast array of work-based learning experiences, internships, apprenticeships, co-ops, what I call the short duration, high-intensity work experiences. I mean, I think I'm very proud to note that among our companies, we have 650,000 internship, apprenticeship, and co-op opportunities that are created annually. That's one in eight US internships are at a BRT member company. The last point I would make on scaling work-based learning is the CEO of Accenture, Julie Sweet, and Greg Case, the CEO of Aon, started working with us several years ago in Chicago and built a model of nearly 70 companies in that area in partnership with community colleges to create a consortium of companies to work together on how they could advance apprenticeships, that work was so successful it is actually replicated in a number of regions across the country.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Wow! So there is a ton of great work happening and a ton of impact. And as you're saying, I don't think, Dane, we could ever talk about too much about scale because I think that's what we're all wondering, right? Is how do we really bring quality workforce opportunities and the range of them to more and more employees who need and learners who need them? So I think you started to go in this direction, but what does it look like to take these commitments to change outcomes for workers on the ground? Like, what does it look like to move from the commitment to expansion of these types of these models to practically doing it, because I think that's often where some of the biggest challenges can lie.

Dane Linn: I love this question, and this is what actually excites me most about the work that I, along with my team, do here at Business Roundtable, because aspiration without execution does not lead to results. But in order to get from aspiration to execution, you really have to do a couple of things with the business community. You have to make the business case. What's the economic argument? Be very clear about the value add of doing this work, because that's going to give you the credibility to get a CEO to say, "Yeah, I want to hire more individuals with criminal records. Well, why? Why should you do that? Well, one reason because you cannot get all the candidates you want through the traditional pathway, and those individuals, whether they're incarcerated or not, by the way, one in four individuals in this country have a criminal record. That is a talent pool, but making the business case is key. Examples of that work-based learning. Again, I'll use that one as an example. The return on the investment is between $1.40 to $1.90 for every dollar invested in registered apprenticeships, you're going to retain 40% of those workers at a BRT company after five years. That's one year longer. And mental health, the mental health investment will drive four times the employee engagement and lead to 13% higher productivity. With the CEO's ownership, that's the key to activation. That's where we get the chief human resource officers to say, Okay, I get it. He or she wants us to do X. Let's figure out how we take what he or she wants to do and move to the operational level. I think about our work, for example, on second chance that I've already mentioned. You know, there is a CEO-led effort that we have in partnership with the Society for Human Resource Management, the Pivot Program at Georgetown University, and other universities around the country, where we have collectively come together, say what can we do to help execute on getting more companies to hire individuals with criminal records. And the last ingredient is partnerships. The business community has made the critical partnerships in the way that I just described with SHRM and other organizations. We have to create space for members to engage in shared research, peer learning, so that we can collaboratively create assets and scale those practices that are proven. I would really encourage our listeners to take a look at our website and a piece that we came out with on the durable skills assessment, we have a piece out that was created in partnership with many of our companies in the HR function, and laying out what does it look like to measure those soft skills to ensure that the individual is going to be successful.

Julian Alssid: Well, the workforce system is shifting so rapidly, Dane, on so many fronts, and we know that that is presenting a whole new set of challenges with respect to getting people the skills they need in order to be employable. How? And let's begin with the elephant in the room. How are your members in particular responding to AI's impact on hiring and skill needs.

Dane Linn: From our perspective, AI is going to create opportunities for workers to move up the value chain to create new ways of working. But it's also going to put pressure on some jobs, and a lot of our members are working along those lines. So think PwC and McKinsey, S&P have really done, I think, a helpful job through the analyses they've done, where they've predicted augmentation rather than large-scale dislocation and the potential for job creation and productivity growth and wage enhancement. You know, we published a report last month with The Burning Glass Institute that validates that. So AI is changing the work people do within jobs and the skills that are required across jobs more than it's actually eliminating. And I went to a meeting last week. Fortune 100 company was a conversation with the chief human resource officer that said, you know, our focus is really about helping our employees successfully make that transition, and one way they're doing that is to begin to isolate what are the tasks. We talk a lot, or we hear a lot about the importance of tasks that individuals are doing, and what is it that AI can augment, and what is it that the individual, the employee, can do more of and more value-related work. We just released. We also just released this brief with The Burning Glass Institute that measures the early impact of AI on jobs and skills. And to the point I made earlier about the durable skills, AI is raising the value of the human skills that take time and applied practice to develop. So think judgment, critical thinking, context, understanding, creativity. What I'm particularly proud of is that you know we have 100,000 workers at BRT member companies who already hold at least one AI-related credential, and our companies require 16% more durable skills per job opening than they did three years ago. So the companies that are getting this right are really going beyond merely just the technology implementation. They're treating AI as a human capital challenge. So what skills become more valuable. How do we build them more systematically? So this is really not just digital fluency. This is AI fluency. But AI fluency and human skills aren't in competition. We need both of them, and the skills need to be honed through real work experience beyond the classroom instruction, and that ties back to my earlier point on work-based learning. I particularly like the way that John Furner, the relatively new CEO of Walmart, talks about this, and he mentioned this on the panel at our Workforce Forum two weeks ago. One of the things he says is that they're really working to be a company that is people-led and tech-powered. You know, AI is going to change how people shop, and it's also going to touch everyone's job at Walmart. So the company is investing in the technology to give their associates the best tools that they need to be the best they can be in their job, but not just the job they have today, because those investments in technology and training are going to open the door for more opportunities, new jobs, promotions, or otherwise. One of the things we can do is to help them focus on the transition pathways within the company. So think internal talent mobility, not outplacement. Think mapping the skill adjacencies. What knowledge, skills, behaviors, and abilities do I bring that make me an ideal candidate for another job? I don't have to go back to night school and get another credential. How do we figure out the shortest credible path from role A to role B? So, for example, companies should be thinking about how do we move workers from cost centers where companies are likely to have incentives to ramp up the use of AI to growth centers.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for going to the place of how work-based learning can support some of the durable skill development and giving employees the opportunity to develop those skills earlier and earlier. I think as we're seeing AI unfold, one of the challenges is really around how do learners build those durable skills, even when they're fairly new to the workforce, and how to build those judgment skills when you know some of it just comes from years of experience. And so, grappling with building the opportunities that most allow for those durable skills to be developed and practiced just feels invaluable at this moment, and for where we're headed as well.

Dane Linn: And Kaitlin, let me just build on that point because I think it's critical. We're going to be doing some work to help companies open the aperture of what those experiences look like. In some cases, we have companies that are really honed in on apprenticeships. And what we're suggesting in the report that we released is, even if you're not hiring, opening the door of opportunity to an individual, an undergrad student, a student in an apprenticeship, to have the experience of a co-op, or to work three months at a company to work on a specific project. Opening the aperture of the range of experiences they create is critical to affording more individuals the opportunity to practice the skills that they've learned in the classroom.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, absolutely. As we're having this conversation it is pretty far-reaching, and so I will also take us in the direction of policy for a moment, Dane, if you're so inclined to speak about this too, but I think we're curious as to what are the most critical policy levers that need to be in place to support workers through this moment, and companies as well.

Dane Linn: We have a set of challenges and opportunities in front of us today. Companies in partnership with training providers, nonprofits are best equipped to respond to those challenges and opportunities today. Federal policy lags, but federal policy is critical, and so we need the workforce system. Whether it's funded by WIOA, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the apprenticeship legislation, or otherwise, we need the federal workforce system as a partner as well. One way that federal policy can help is giving us not just more data. We need better data. We need more timely data, and we need policies that show us on the data side of the equation how is AI changing jobs, how is it changing tasks, how is it changing skills. We need policies that support the employer investments in workers, so people can build new skills and prepare for those new roles. What do we do? Matt Sigelman talks a lot about pre-scaling. Let's not wait till the person's dislocated. Let's start to get ahead of the challenge, both as a company, but also for the individual. How do we use federal policy to expand apprenticeships and other work-based learning that allow people to build skills on the job? And I think we were very excited by the passage of the Workforce Pell expansion and how that, along with apprenticeship programs, can support the kind of lever that people build that can accelerate what employers are already doing. So, employer demand, we think, for interns has returned to a five-year high, and only 37% of college seniors have completed a paid internship. So, we think there's that's the start of federal policy. We think there's some federal policy that could be addressed through taxes, tax incentives as well. But there's a lot that federal policy can do, and I'm not sure it's necessarily through a reauthorization of WIOA. We think that's critically important, and we should get that done. But we should also look to previous efforts in other administrations. You know, for example, the Biden administration had the Good Jobs Challenge. Many of your listeners will remember the TAACCCT program during the Obama administration. Let's not wait for a reauthorization. Let's try to create bipartisan legislation that responds to the challenges today that will equip not just individuals but the country to be competitive.

Julian Alssid: So well said. I toast to that. This is such a complex undertaking. Your members alone cannot solve this problem, and we didn't even, we haven't even talked about the smaller companies that constitute the majority of employers in the country. But without the educators, you know, you've touched on so many of the stakeholders, the policymakers, the workforce people, the people dealing with those formerly incarcerated, and so on. We're never going to get this done. So, given that, and so we know workforce development is a multidisciplinary undertaking, and given that we call our podcast Work Forces, we would love to hear your thoughts about what would you recommend to the educators and employers and policymakers who themselves want to become forces in expanding economic opportunity for workers?

Dane Linn: Yeah, let me take that question, but I want to pick up on two key words, maybe three, that you mentioned: small and medium-sized employers. Four words. All of the resources that we are producing are open sourced. You'll find those on our website. We want to produce resources, yes, that are helpful to the Business Roundtable members, but we want to equip those small and medium-sized businesses who don't have the capacity of the large-sized employers. And so, we encourage those members of your audience who represent the small and medium-sized employers to take a look at them. Take a look at what other companies have done. Tweak it to meet your own needs. Now, in response to your question, I think there are a couple of things on the employer side. I've already talked about how we need employers to continue to build on the work that they're doing. The additional point I would make is we need to embed proven practices. I am way beyond the let's look at what a best practice is. Proven practices, as evidenced by the data, and that's what we really focus on through the Business Roundtable Corporate Initiatives. We share those proven practices with our peer companies in hopes that J.P. Morgan Chase will take and learn from what General Motors has done. Different sectors, but we're all facing the same problem. The solutions don't have to be terribly different. I think it's more tweaking than wholesale changing what the companies are doing. Secondly, employers need to make the business case for treating workforce development as a strategy. We think that's pretty strong and gaining momentum across our membership. And lastly, the programs will come and go unless you measure your program success and you share that success and you scale that success. On the educator side, we need alignment. You've heard me talk about this alignment between what the employers need, and I would say to the educators, don't design a program because you think what the employers need, and you've had a conversation, invite the employers to the table. Many employers want to help you develop that curriculum, so that's the type of partnership that will align the skills attainment and get us to scale. On the policymaker side, and not just federal policy, it's equally important at the state level. There are going to be at least 26 new governors in the country after this midterm election. Let's forge a partnership, policymakers at the state level and the federal level, figure out what are the proof points and what is the scale that will get us to identifying what works. The policy job is to enable a strong infrastructure. It's not to create a new program. It's an infrastructure that's sustainable, regardless of who is in power, because that infrastructure lets those practices spread. Think portability of skill signals, apprenticeship support, the recognition of multiple pathways, and then for all three of them, the workforce ecosystem will be more aligned, effective, and impactful with employers if we're all involved as true partners.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So thank you for those very practical, measured recommendations, and really appreciate you mentioning the open source materials that are available for small and mid-sized businesses as well. And as we wind down our conversation, kind of building off that last point around available resources, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work at Business Roundtable?

Dane Linn: Easy. Go to brt.org. As Kaitlin, you just mentioned all of our resources, all of our research, whether it's the AI brief, the work-based learning report, the durable skills assessment framework, a lot of company examples of who's doing what and the impact that they've had. You know, I would note, for example, the work that EY did with us down in Texas with Alamo Community Colleges, all first-generation students go through a two-year program. They all get an internship. 95% complete the program. They all get hired. They're making 70k a year. First generation student, first person in their family to go to college. Think about the impact that has on future generations for that individual's family, not just their children, their nieces, their nephews, their neighbors, and so those are the types of tools that you'll find on our website. Follow us on LinkedIn and our news releases, and also take a look at our policy priorities as well.

Julian Alssid: Thank you so much for taking the time today, Dane. This has been a great conversation, and I'm ready to go right back to the website now to continue digging. But we look forward to following your work and keeping in touch.

Dane Linn: Well, Kaitlin, Julian, thanks for having me today. I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to what we're going to be able to accomplish as we go through this transition.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely, thank you so much. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about the Work Forces consulting practice, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Jeremy Schifeling, author and career coach, has devoted his career to helping others succeed in theirs, from teaching kindergarten in Brooklyn, NY to training career professionals at more than 350 organizations and universities worldwide. In this conversation, Jeremy traces the arc from AI's early promise as a career coaching tool to the arms race it has created in hiring, where students are applying to hundreds of jobs with AI-generated materials and recruiters are struggling to identify real talent. He shares data about the enduring power of human connection and referrals over algorithmic job searching, making the case that career centers are uniquely positioned to lead on AI fluency rather than wait for someone else to go first. He also challenges educators and workforce practitioners to stop using complexity as a permission slip for inaction.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so, with that, let's dive in.

The New York Times recently published a thought-provoking story about a new MIT report that is warning that AI is causing what they call cognitive surrender on college campuses, with students reaching for chatbots when struggling with a new concept, and university leaders offering a range of guidance about how to respond. Some are embracing AI enthusiastically, others are banning it, and many are somewhere in between, trying to figure out the right answer in real time.

Julian Alssid: And that tension lands right at the heart of what we think about in workforce development, if students are outsourcing their thinking to AI before they ever even enter the labor market, you know what does that mean for the skills they bring with them, and who is responsible for helping them develop the judgment to know when to use AI and when not to? Those aren't just questions for universities; they're questions for employers, career coaches, and really anyone who works at this intersection of learning and careers.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to our guest today, Jeremy Schifeling, has devoted his career to helping others succeed in theirs. From teaching kindergarten in Brooklyn to leading education marketing at LinkedIn. He's gone on to publish best-selling LinkedIn and AI job-seeking books on Amazon and train career professionals at more than 350 organizations and universities worldwide. Jeremy's newest book, Unbreakable, makes the case that the workers who will thrive in the age of AI are not the ones chasing every new tool, but the ones developing the scarce human skills that technology cannot replace. Jeremy, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us today.

Jeremy Schifeling: Thanks for having me on. Thrilled to be here.

Julian Alssid: Great, Jeremy. Yes, so glad to have you here. And if you will, in your own words, tell us a bit about your background.

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah, absolutely. So as mentioned, you know, I got my start teaching kindergarten in Bed Stuy, and one of the things that I realized early on was technology was going to be part of these kids' lives forever. And here I was in the early 2000s teaching them how to make PowerPoint, how to make mp3s. It seems quaint by today's standards, but then over the course of my journey working at LinkedIn, working as a career coach at the University of Michigan, working with all these schools today, I realize that technological drumbeat has only gotten faster and faster with each passing year. And so, one of the things I've always been very passionate about is how do we prepare that next generation, not just to survive these technological changes, but actually to thrive. And so, that's what we're all trying to figure out right now in this age of AI.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely. So, I mean, you've you've written a few books, right? That in some ways trace that arc of how careers and job searching have changed. And of course, this is going from learners in kindergarten to you know people going into the workforce. But those books have covered mastering LinkedIn, using AI as a career coach to your newest book, would love to have you walk us through your evolution and your thinking, and and what what do you feel are some of the common threads that cut across and and new learnings that emerged for you as you wrote each of those books.

Jeremy Schifeling: So I'll just sort of pick up with AI because I think that's what's on everyone's minds these day these days. So I had really sort of this interesting opportunity, which is I was leading the marketing team at Khan Academy back in 2022, and my boss Sal Khan came to me that summer and said, Jeremy, I just got this amazing new tool from my buddy Sam Altman over at OpenAI. This was before anyone knew who Sam Altman really was, and I said, Ah, we always hear about these new things in Silicon Valley, you know, crypto and all this stuff. And then I used ChatGPT when it was still in beta before it had been released to the public for the first time, and I was like, Wow, this is going to be big. I could even tell back then, but I was so naive because, as someone who had been a career coach, I thought it was going to be a panacea. I had worked with all these international students, all these introverts who had trouble telling their story, and that was holding them back when it came to the job search. I said, now everyone's going to have a career coach in their pocket. Everything's going to be solved. Fast forward two years, and I'm working with all these students around the country and around the world. None of them are using it the way that I envisioned, you know, to figure out their perfect path in life and to do all this deep reflection, instead they're using it like the Staples Easy button: build me a resume, write me a cover letter, and now I'm talking to all the recruiters of the world who are throwing up their hands, saying, Jeremy, this is a disaster. I can't tell who's good. Everything just seems fake. And so, really, this AI journey in just a couple of years went from what I thought was going to be utopia to a little bit of a nightmare, and now we're trying to find our way out of it.

Julian Alssid: Well, so yeah, so kind of diving a little bit, a little bit deeper there. So you've described AI as creating an arms race in in hiring and career preparation, you know, for everyone involved with you know students racing ahead as we've discussed, and employers trying to get a handle on this, and you know, and some employers kind of you know a little frozen as to what to do around hiring, and so can you unpack that dynamic and what what does it mean for all the people and institutions who are trying to navigate their way?

Jeremy Schifeling: So imagine you know fall 2022, ChatGPT comes out. All of a sudden, students who once might have applied to 10 or 20 jobs realize that the incremental cost of applying to a marginal job has essentially gone to zero. Right? Say ChatGPT, build me resumes for every one of these 100 job applications. Done. And so now all of a sudden, if you're a recruiter, you were facing about 100 applications per job in the fall of 2022. Here in the fall of 2026, you're facing about 250 applications per job, more than a doubling in just a few short years. At the same time, because there were these huge layoffs going through the industry, guess who was being laid off every time you saw a headline at Amazon or Meta or any of these places? It was the recruiters because if these firms were consolidating, they just needed fewer recruiters to do the job. So all of a sudden, you have more applications from students, fewer recruiters to process them. It's a disaster for the recruiting profession. So what do they do? They erect higher barriers. They either have entry-level jobs that require five years of experience, or they have even more high-powered applicant tracking systems that basically say, Hey, we've got to screen out 95% of these candidates because we don't have time to deal with them. Now, come back to the student. This is sort of the cycle part. They say, Hey, it just got way harder to get a job, there are fewer entry-level jobs all of a sudden, and my acceptance rate is way lower. I better apply to even more jobs using even more AI, and the cycle spins and spins in classic arms race fashion.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And so, what I mean, as you're having these conversations with with job seekers, with students, with career coaches, I mean, what are some of the what's some of the guidance you're offering, right? Because this is, as you're saying, this is a really complex time and and sort of unprecedented in many ways. Would love to hear the guidance you're offering to these different, you know, key players in the space.

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah. So to build on a sort of arms race metaphor, how do you stop an arms race? You have to have a peace treaty, right? You have to step outside of that vicious cycle dynamic and find a better way. And so, what I'm recommending on both sides of the house is getting back to the more humanistic things. What I tell coaches and students is: Look, you might think that your chance of getting any job is something like 0.1 percent. So if you just apply to 1000 jobs, you're on average likely to get one offer. In reality, when you apply with AI and everything is all the same, your chance is essentially zero. So you can multiply zero times anything, you're still getting zero offers. So if you want to play a way better game, the data is super clear. A referral back in 2016 was about a 10x advantage over applying online in terms of your chances of being hired. In the age of AI, when we can no longer trust anything we see on our screens, it is now a 20x advantage. So I'm telling all those students: get out there, talk to real people, get that real advantage. And the same thing for employers. Instead of just reviewing resumes and screening cover letters that are all sort of homogenous, what if you actually met with students and had a chance to sort of get to know them face to face? Maybe you can use your own human algorithm to detect who feels really like a good fit in a way that the ATS never can, and so basically stepping away from this AI precipice, coming back to some of those human fundamentals.

Julian Alssid: Those make so much sense, and I spend a lot of time talking to my 20-something kids about about this. And I guess one, you know, one challenge they face is so much of their their lives have been around using technology and social media. Can you, you know, like how do you, how do you even build that skill to get the referrals? And how do you, how do you, you know, like, what, like, what's your advice to someone who's just coming out of or recently out of college about kind of building the kinds of relationships that lead to referrals. Because my hunch is that it's hard to do that strictly online. You can't do it just online.

Jeremy Schifeling: I'm so glad you mentioned this, Julian. Because here's the deal: we expect our students, our Gen Z kids, or the students that we teach, to go out there and do all this stuff, and yet they've never been taught how to do it. Right? It's crazy our priorities in our society, where we want every kid to memorize the periodic table, but not know how to take someone out to coffee and meet a new person. And so I think whether you're in workforce development, whether you're a career coach, whether you're just on faculty in an organization, it's incumbent upon us as the older generation to actually empower the younger generation with the skills to do these things, and then I think the biggest thing we can also do, and this is almost like a mind mindset shift, is I know it is so hard to imagine when you're 18 or 21 or 25, but when you're 38 and 45 and 65, you do really want to help the next generation. You know, there's this whole psychological field of generativity that Erik Erikson coined, which basically says the further along in your career you get, the more you want to leave your legacy, the more you want to pay it forward. And so we got to tell students, hey, when you reach out to these older folks, you're not bothering them, you're not annoying them, you're actually giving them the greatest gift, which is the chance to be generative and share what they've learned. And if we can sort of bridge that divide where the students have the skills and they also understand where we're coming from, now I feel like they're going to be better able to to meet the moment where it's at.

Kaitlin LeMoine: When you mentioned the notion of you know we need to we need to prepare learners with these skill sets, I think more and more the types of skills you're mentioning around networking and you know, setting up coffee dates, or I think more and more of those types of skills are being woven into career services type practices, right? I'd be curious to hear you talk more about you know the gap between where career services in organizations and in higher education institutions where the gap where the gaps are for them, because I think this is a really complicated moment for for those departments as well. Just around navigating, you know. There's of course AI is still relatively new, but also needing to prepare this next generation. Would love to hear you to talk a little bit about that.

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah, I feel really bad for the career coaches of the world right now because more and more, the responsibility for the number one outcome of education, which is prepare people for the workforce, prepare them for a career and a great life, is falling on their shoulders, and yet at the same time, they're doing it with less resourcing, with less headcount, and so it's just asking a lot of these folks. And then on top of that, they also now have to be AI fluent. We only have 40% of career coaches in America trained on AI. So how can we expect them to lead on AI? And so my sort of call is: career centers should advocate for themselves. You know, they should be able to demonstrate the ROI of what they're driving. But then higher education leaders or workforce development leaders should respond to that clarion call and say, "Hey, if we're going to ask you to work minor miracles in our students' lives, we got to empower you to do that with AI training, with resourcing, with headcount. That's commensurate to the task that's on their shoulders.

Julian Alssid: So, so you think it's just about allocating resources to this? I mean, is that is it is it that simple?

Jeremy Schifeling: This is a great question. So, yeah, if you were just going to go to a career services team today that's operating in the way that was operating in 1985, say, and say, "Hey, do more resume workshops, do more cover letter workshops, obviously that's not going to get the job done. The world has changed so much since then, and it's changing even faster as we speak. However, if you allocate that money towards saying, "Hey, we know that a lot of members of academia are not so pleased with what AI has done to their syllabi and their assessments and everything that they've relied upon for years, but because you are the one concrete bridge to the world of work, we want you to actually lead on this to teach students that yes, you should be using AI, but there's a right way to use AI and a wrong way, and we're going to make sure that you feel so confident with these tools that you can represent that to the next generation, because we can't guarantee, you know, given tenure that that's going to happen in every classroom on our august university, but we can absolutely make sure that the career center is representing what employers want and giving the students the skills to be absolutely fluent in what matters.

Julian Alssid: But that's a pretty tall order. I mean, educators and workforce professionals didn't necessarily sign on to do this, and they don't necessarily have the skills themselves. So how how should they think about building this into their programs?

Jeremy Schifeling: So I'm going to give you an example of a change that was made in the business school career coaching world over the last couple decades, and then I'm going to show you why I think this is possible in all career coaching. So when I went to University of Michigan as an MBA student 15 years ago, every single coach, even at the business school, was a lifetime coach. You know, master's degrees in counseling, therapy, all that kind of stuff, and again, they were really good at understanding us as humans, not so great at understanding industry. That wasn't their background. However, by the time I came to coach at the University of Michigan's business school, seven years later, every single coach came from industry. There was a finance coach from J.P. Morgan, a consulting coach from Deloitte. I was the tech coach from Google and Apple and LinkedIn, and they basically said we need this skill set, so we're going to go out and hire for it. And again, that takes resources, that takes headcount. But I think the same is true. It's either we're going to train up the folks who are already there, or if we need to layer in additional skills, let's bring in people who actually are using AI out in the real world because that's what our students are about to have to do in a few short months or years.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I also wonder how the you know there's been such a push and a momentum toward work-based learning opportunities, internships, making sure that learners obtain these professional work experiences, right? Like before leaving a college or university, I do wonder too how that factors into some of what you're saying around, you know, giving people not not only the coaching but just the real world experience of being in environments where they're using these tools and developing some of the other skills, like the more human skills we're talking about as well.

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah, you nailed it, Kaitlin. Like, here's the real deal. I'm a hiring manager myself. I hire for my own company. I never say, Hey, what AI certificate do you have? How did you do it in your AI course in college? I say, What have you built with AI? Because the really big upside of AI, because I know we're usually focused on the dark sides, is the fact is that every single person on this planet today is a computer scientist and a data scientist and a designer because they have those tools at their disposal in a way that didn't exist four years ago, and so if you're going through college not actually building awesome stuff, creating a portfolio of what's possible, then I start to wonder as a hiring manager, what can you actually do for me when I give you those same tools and those same resources?

Julian Alssid: So, Jeremy, given that our our podcast is called Work Forces, what would you recommend to educators and employers and and policymakers as well? We really haven't gone there so much, but I think this has all sorts of implications for for policy. What what what would you recommend to those who want to become forces in preparing workers and learners for careers in in the age of AI?

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah, I am so glad you asked this, Julian, because this is my biggest thought. Is I know people see this as a threat. They say, "Hey, things were pretty good up until AI came out. You know, we had a grasp on what we were doing. It, we were in rinse, wash, and repeat mode. Now AI has shaken everything up. But I see AI as a real leadership opportunity. If you're a workforce development leader who's always advocating for more funding, now you say, hey! If you're going to invest in us, we're going to absolutely magnify the return because our clients can do so much more. If you're a career center leader who said, "Hey, we have the worst office on campus. We're in some dank basement in the hinterlands of the campus. Well, guess what? This is your chance to step up and say, we're not just going to coach our students getting a job. We're going to equip them with the skills they need to build a career, build a great life. And I feel like if folks want to seize the mantle for this, there's a couple things they can do. Number one, if you've been on the sidelines, it is not too late. I think we've all been shamed by our IT teams over the years. Don't touch that new technology-it's too scary. You might break it. AI is the one technology that breaks all the rules for IT because you can't break it. It is a digital sandbox for you to play with. So, for anyone listening to this who needs that permission to come into the party, I say go for it. Try to plan a vacation with it. Try to come up with a witty joke to tell your kids at dinner. Just start to see that jagged edge of what actually works in AI, what it's not so good at, and then once you start to understand it, say, "Hey, this is not so complicated. We don't need to get caught up in you know all the AI hysteria and this model versus that model. Let's just show our students, let's just show our clients how they can use it to get things done in their lives that are important to them, and I think if we can claim that leadership mantle, the resources, the headcount, everything else is going to follow along.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So, I guess I'm just I'm I'm wondering when you say like you know continue to use these tools. I think there's also been you know as we kind of kicked off this conversation today, questions around like should we use it, should we not use it? Right, like navigating the the complexities of the decision making around those tools. Would love to hear your thoughts on on navigating that complexity.

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah, so I really tip my cap to Ethan Mollick here because I know he coined this term a couple years ago over at Wharton. This idea of the jagged frontier is that AI is really superhuman at some things, completely idiotic at others, and because there's no manual that comes with AI, there's no guidebook to every possible scenario. The only way to discover these things is by doing it yourself. As an example, if you went to ChatGPT in November of 2022 when it came out and said write a cover letter, you would have thought it was a minor miracle. Oh my goodness! It's grammatical. It's got the three paragraphs. But then, only once you realize it does the same thing over and over again with the same template, do you start to see the dark side. And you would not have uncovered that just reading blogs about AI or reading headlines about AI. The way you uncover it is by getting your hands dirty with AI. And again, I know no one has enough time in the day to do these things, but just starting to bake it into your workflow, make it a part of your toolkit, is the most natural way. As I told my kindergartners back in the day, to learn by doing, and then once you've put in the time, when you've put in the couple hours to really start to understand these things, you say, "Hey, I'm no longer going to send my students out to the wolves to figure this out on their own. I'm going to actually lead them out there because I have strong feelings about what's good and what's less effective.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I think it's a complex moment, right? To to figure to navigate that and figure that out, and what is good and what's less effective, and and where are the use cases where using these tools makes really good sense, and where does it become much more complicated? Feels like we're at that moment.

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah, I'm going to say something spicy for your audience, which is: do not allow the complexity to be your permission slip for inaction. I work with hundreds of universities around the world, and Kaitlin and Julian, what do you think is their number one question about AI. What are our peer schools doing? Again, this kind of let me not be the leader here. The leader gets arrows in the back. I'm just going to be that follower. I'm going to learn from someone else who goes out in front. And because I'm still getting that question four years into this journey, what I see a lot of folks doing is saying, "Hey, let's use complaints about legal, IT, all these different things as reasons not to take actions. Reasons not even to use it myself personally. And unfortunately, even though you might say, "Well, I'm senior in my career. I'm set. I don't have to worry about this. I'm going to retire in a few years. Your job is to ensure that the next generation is ready, no matter how you personally feel about it, and so if we have that responsibility to truly pay it forward, like Erik Erikson said, then I think we owe it to that next generation to put in the time and the work ourselves, not just wait for someone else to do it.

Julian Alssid: So, where is the leadership coming from, then? I mean, that's you know, I think what you're describing is not atypical in terms of pushing the frontiers of institutions like academia.

Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah. So here, here's where I see it. It's bubbling up in all these little pockets inside each career center. Usually not at the director level because again, they're managing the bureaucracy, they're managing all the politics. But it's usually like an associate director or an assistant director, even someone a little bit younger, who's like, I'm using all this stuff. I don't want to tell anyone because I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want the IT team to rap my knuckles, but I'm doing incredible stuff, and I'm starting to talk to my students about it. And I think if you're a smart director or dean or president, you say, I want to hear those voices. Don't do this in the shadows. Teach us, teach the whole team, and then let us teach the students.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I think as we wind down the conversation today, we would love to learn more about how we can continue to follow your work, along with how our listeners can continue to follow what you're up to.

Jeremy Schifeling: As a LinkedIn alum, I know it's not the fashionable site, but please connect with me on LinkedIn because I love to share and discuss there. I feel like it's one of the few safe spaces on the internet these days where you can actually talk about these things without getting into a flame war. So if you want to debate any of these finer points, would love to see you on LinkedIn.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today, Jeremy.

Jeremy Schifeling: Thank you for the opportunity and good luck to everyone out there. I know it is a heavy burden that is on your shoulders right now, but I'm also confident that just like past generations prepared us, we can do the same for the next.

Julian Alssid: Hear, hear. Thank you, Jeremy.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Work Forces Consulting, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Kate Kreamer, Executive Director of Advance CTE, the longest-standing national nonprofit representing state leaders responsible for secondary, postsecondary, and adult career and technical education, discusses what it actually takes to build CTE systems that are rigorous, relevant, and ready to scale. Kate makes the case for two-way academic integration, arguing that while CTE programs have long been expected to reinforce core academics, there has never been a reciprocal expectation that core academic teachers draw on labor market data and career competencies to make their instruction more relevant. The conversation explores the perennial challenge of employer engagement, why the field keeps having the same conversation about advisory committees without cracking the code on co-design and co-investment, and what models like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Talent Pipeline Management program are doing differently. Kate also examines the growing role of intermediaries in building and sustaining strong career pathways, why sustainability remains the field's biggest unanswered funding question, and why the single most important thing educators, employers, and policymakers can do is go see a modern CTE program in action before drawing any conclusions about what it is or isn't.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: As we continue season seven, career and technical education keeps coming up as a thread across our work and our conversations on this podcast. There's real momentum in the field right now, and with that momentum comes some genuinely hard questions about quality, consistency, and how to build systems that work for every student.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And those questions, along with the answers to them, look very different depending on where you sit. What they look like at the state policy level, where the decisions about standards, funding, and employer engagement, among other key factors, actually get made, is something we've been wanting to dig into more deeply on this show for some time.

Julian Alssid: Which is exactly why we're so glad to have today's guest with us. Kate Kreamer is the Executive Director of Advance CTE, the longest-standing national nonprofit representing state leaders responsible for secondary, post-secondary, and adult career and technical education across the country. Kate first joined Advance CTE in 2013 and was appointed executive director by the board in 2023, bringing with her a background that includes work at Achieve, Third Way, and the Progressive Policy Institute. Kate, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us.

Kate Kreamer: Thank you, Julian and Kaitlin. Glad to be here.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for being with us. And as we dive in, we would love to give you the floor to tell us a bit more about your background and the path that led to your current role as Executive Director of Advance CTE.

Kate Kreamer: Great. Well, thank you. Well, I like many people that work in the education sector, my parents were in education. My father was a chemistry teacher turned building and then district level administrator. My mother was a librarian turned library director. So it's in my DNA, and the value is just inherent in everything I did growing up, and just kind of a core expectation that education is the grounding of what really brings your future. But I also was very aware, and increasingly became aware, kind of in high school, of the opportunities created by my parents, including moving out of New Haven, where my father went to high school and taught, actually, but chose to move to a suburb when they had my brother and myself, in large part because of the schools, and that always, you know, and the challenges he had in New Haven that were very different than the challenges we had in my suburban school, kind of recognized this is actually not something that everyone has access to in the right way, and was something that kind of woke something up and raised some questions for me. And I kind of found public policy, which is a random thing to find, but I found it really in my undergraduate. I was studying urban regional studies, and that had a lot of economic development, public policy, and environmental science behind it, and that's when I kind of married the two. This idea of public policy, education, economic development—didn't know that was going to be a part of my career, but it does make sense. I mean, that was what I was really interested in. So I moved right to DC. I fell in love with DC as a kid, knew I wanted to do public policy in college, started directly in grad school and an internship, and this was right in the middle to late aughts when college readiness was really taking off as a conversation, and it really struck me. I'm a very practical, pragmatic person. This idea of high school reform at this point, but this idea that high school is this pivot point between K-12 and whatever comes next, that just resonated. Why would high school be the end when it really is the connector across these systems? So I ended up working at Achieve, as you mentioned. Spent seven years there, and that was an organization that really led college readiness efforts. They were behind the Common Core, the PARCC assessments, Next Generation Science Standards. But I really loved that content, and also worked with state leaders across all those sectors: K-12, postsecondary, workforce, governors' offices, private industry. And in that, I really saw the power of state leadership and a shared agenda. But as I was going along, it was my dream job when I ended up there as an early 20-something-year-old, but we were talking academic preparation for college and careers. We really weren't trying to tackle the technical or even those transferable skills. And it probably was Perkins IV, which was reauthorized in 2006, where, as happens when you have major federal legislation, it starts a national conversation. So people started talking about CTE and Perkins. And I kind of started digging in, and that's when I met my predecessor at Advance CTE and started working with the Association for Career and Technical Education and others, and just fell in love with it and became the champion and voice within that organization. Was able to do some really cool work around applied math and how you're applying math across different CTE areas. Did these Math at Work brochures where 50,000 of them were sent out, actually demonstrating that you do need math in careers, but also got to write papers and do a whole bunch of work. I was really appreciative that where there was opportunity and space, the organization let me pursue my passion. But when I had the chance in 2013 to move and do CTE full time, I jumped right at it. I've spent 13 years at Advance CTE. The organization has changed dramatically, the field has changed dramatically, the environment has changed dramatically, and it's been really exciting. Obviously I'm still here after all these years, so I still have that passion for the work and the opportunities, most importantly, that it provides learners across the country.

Julian Alssid: Well, it's so great, Kaitlin, when we get past the canned bio to the actual story. It's really great to hear your story. It's an excellent segue, especially given your background. Advance CTE has made a strong push on academic integration in CTE, making the case that connected learning and academic preparation belong together rather than in separate tracks, which is how they've been treated in many places historically. Apart from you, or including you, what's driving that conversation now, and where do you see the field heading?

Kate Kreamer: Yeah, I think there are a couple things to that. This has been something that I've been really passionate about. A lot of the work I did in my last organization was around bringing CTE and core academics together as the way in, but there hasn't been a lot of momentum. In recent years, a lot of that was very standards-based, and people got a little burned out on standards after Common Core and didn't really want to lean in here. But where we are right now, the real difference is there is now a shared understanding that all learners should have opportunities for career-connected learning or some sort of career readiness engagement experiences. That was not really the case 10 years ago, where we were saying every student should have career advising, work-based learning, and be ready for a full range of postsecondary options. That national conversation and momentum has really shifted, in part because CTE has momentum, is getting more visibility, has amazing outcomes, and more learners want that engagement and relevance—which is not a new thing, but in this moment with COVID, the cost of higher ed, and the changing workforce, it's more prescient than ever before. We also have a growing body of research that supports what those of us in the field have known: learners want relevance. You're seeing a lot of data from Gen Z and younger learners asking for that in much more explicit ways. In this attention economy, we have to pay attention to that, because if we're not actually meeting that, we are losing that generation and their engagement. So while we would love for everyone to be on a CTE pathway, we recognize that's not likely or even possible. The question then is, how do we ensure that the authentic real-world experiences fostered through CTE can happen across the curriculum? To do this, you need two-way integration. And we're very explicit: this is two-way. CTE has had a responsibility for reinforcing core academics—literacy, numeracy, science. It's in our accountability system under Perkins. We can argue how well that's going, but that's been an expectation. There's never been an expectation going the other way. How are core academics pulling out what industry says they need? How are you aligning your lessons and projects to real-world, authentic efforts? How are you taking those durable or transferable skills—collaboration, communication, time management—and pulling them forward, helping students explicitly understand the skills they are gaining, whether in a core academic or CTE classroom? The blurring of those lines between academic and technical puts us in a better position from the CTE side to lean in and ask for that partnership because of where we are in the broader education ecosystem, the resources going into it, and the bipartisan support we have. This is potentially the time to make our move. Now, what it's going to take is a much bigger challenge. We're tackling it in two ways. One, we need more voices at the national level championing this. It cannot just come from CTE or the career side of the house. We need folks in core academics saying this is important and partnering to make content more relevant. I think you're seeing the math community trying to push on this relevance, and we can push them further to connect to careers and durable skills. And the truth of the matter is, we need better structures at the state and local level to enable this level of collaboration and interdisciplinary work. It takes time, mindset, and space to actually plan it. We see this at the local level where so much comes down to a building administrator wanting to do it, but at the state level, state agencies are not structured in any way for this type of collaboration across content areas. We think there's some low-hanging fruit in building relationships at the state level that could be modeled at the local level.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, absolutely. As we were talking, I was making a note about the practical aspect of making this work happen. So I'm so happy, Kate, that that's where you went automatically—what do we do about this? There are so many levers to pull, and so much of this is about making space for collaboration, conversations, and training. For many people, this is a different way of operating across all these systems. How do we build that kind of capacity across groups and individuals to bring this work to life? So I appreciated you going in that direction because it's a real set of challenges.

Kate Kreamer: It's a real challenge. It's just not how most buildings are set up. You've kind of always heard that CTE is off in the other wing, and while some of that is changing, that doesn't mean you've got common planning time or the right signal. We put out a report at the beginning of this year with a repository around two-way academic integration, looking at what's out there from a state level in terms of policies, PD, technical assistance, curricular resources, and crosswalks. We found a decent amount, but it was all on CTE reinforcing academics. We found scant examples of PD supports for core academic teachers in this area. I heard an anecdotal story where someone said they invited core academic teachers to meetings with CTE and economic development leaders to see labor market data, understand career trends, and hear what industry is asking for. They could then contextualize it in their classrooms, but normally they aren't in those conversations or comprehensive needs assessments. It's never been the expectation, and it's not about adding one more thing on, but providing motivation and understanding of where CTE is going and how they can contribute. It has to be a full, two-way partnership.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, and like you're saying, it provides that additional context as to why these shifts are happening and what's driving them. You referenced a number of these challenges. One area we'd love to look at more closely is getting employers to the table in meaningful ways—not just as advisors, but as co-designers and co-investors. What models are you seeing that work well, and what does it take to make them sustainable and scale them?

Kate Kreamer: Yeah, if I had the answers, I'd be much richer. It's such a good question, and it's at the heart of this. Last spring, Advance CTE, with support from over 40 national organizations, released a shared vision for the future of CTE called CTE Connects, or the Connected Path, where we centered this issue and challenged the field and ourselves to try something different. We held a summit last fall to understand where we are and where we need to go. This issue of employer engagement and partnership is not new—it is the challenge. What struck me was that we are having the same conversation and asking the same questions as 10 or 20 years ago. We haven't really evolved the conversation, and we can't keep having the same one. While we've made progress because CTE has risen in prominence, by no means have we cracked this. To build something at scale, first we need clearer and more consistent signals from employers at the sector or career cluster level. Associations can play a role here, but right now you're still getting one-off, local input from individual employers, which is burdensome on both employers and schools. Where can you pull employers together, ideally at the state level, to give a consistent signal of the most important knowledge, skills, and technology? One really good model is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) program. They bring together employers within a sectoral or occupational grouping and force them to align: "You're all hiring for a technician, so let's agree on the most important competencies." They condense 20 different requests into the top five crucial competencies, put that into one system, and signal to community colleges, CTE programs, and workforce bootcamps what is actually needed. That clear signal is paramount, and we don't have enough of it at scale. Second, we need employers to do more than just give upfront input on a business advisory committee once every two years. How are they engaging in instruction, looking at what instruction looks like, giving feedback, and elevating what works? How are they organizing themselves to give consistent information? That co-investment and co-ownership is missing. Third, industry needs to engage much more rapidly as technology evolves. Curriculum can't move that fast, but having industry come in to co-teach or guest-teach on specific brand-new technologies brings real-time relevance. States are creating spaces for this. Bloomberg Philanthropies is also testing pilots in healthcare and skilled trades focused on front-end, articulated partnerships between education and industry that co-design the entire experience. We're keeping an eye on those lessons learned. Scaling this into every community and state remains the real challenge. Lastly, when big workforce development investments happen, community colleges and workforce organizations are brought in, but K-12 CTE is rarely invited to those tables. That is a missed opportunity for an aligned, single conversation across secondary, postsecondary, and workforce levels.

Julian Alssid: It's funny because this conversation has been going on for a long time, and we haven't cracked the right balance for a working relationship with employers that can respond in real time. You touched on the role of intermediaries when mentioning the Chamber's TPM program. There's a lot of attention now on how intermediaries fit into the CTE system, specifically looking at building a true K-through-career continuum. Can you speak to what's going on in that realm regarding intermediaries building and sustaining strong pathways?

Kate Kreamer: Yes, this has definitely been a growing topic. When we talked about intermediaries 10 or 15 years ago, it was a much narrower lens than what they are now. Advance CTE learned a lot about the power of intermediaries through our involvement in the New Skills Ready Network, a five-year investment JPMorgan Chase made in six communities to build out career pathway systems where regional intermediaries served as the lead hub. There are two big models of intermediaries. One is the convener or regional hub, looking across K-12, postsecondary, workforce, public, private, and labor sectors to take a holistic collective impact approach. The other, more traditional role is the operational connector that manages work-based learning experiences directly between institutions and employers, taking the administrative burden off both sides. Intermediaries have grown because this work is hard, complicated, expensive, and there isn't enough capacity in the system. Districts and postsecondary institutions are tapped out. The question is how to fund these intermediaries sustainably. Currently, they are heavily reliant on philanthropy, which is not a permanent solution. Indiana did a one-time $5 million investment for seed funding for regional intermediaries, which was an interesting model to get things started. But how do they sustain themselves long-term? Once intermediaries compete for federal or state education dollars, tensions rise. Industry gets a lot of talent from these systems and often isn't investing their fair share back into the workforce system. Organizations like chambers that already serve industry are better positioned for sustainability, whereas other non-profits struggle to find dedicated funding sources.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I believe a recent blog post on your site talked about community colleges playing that intermediary role as well. Looking to community colleges as local, regional hubs can help de-silo these efforts.

Kate Kreamer: Yes, I think they can and should do more, especially with K-12. A lot of their existing relationships with K-12 focus on dual enrollment or recruitment, but they have a huge role to play in setting the table for co-designed programs with industry. Local workforce boards also serve as intermediaries. It's about leveraging who in your community has the trust and relationships to bring people together. There's no one-size-fits-all approach. It needs to be coordinated by someone trusted. When done well, like Boston Private Industry Council's work accelerating career pathways in Boston Public Schools, an intermediary with deep trust can drive progress far faster than the system could on its own.

Julian Alssid: As we're talking, so much of this requires training, resources, and capacity, especially when so many organizations are hard-pressed financially and time-wise. So, putting in a plug for more resources in education and workforce development.

Kate Kreamer: You might as well throw Perkins into the mix! Our federal investment in CTE is $1.4 billion, which goes down to local levels and is a drop in the bucket compared to other federal education or workforce funding. People say, "Use Perkins for apprenticeships, intermediaries, or academic integration." Those are all allowable uses, but there aren't enough resources, leading to protectionism where schools first need to buy equipment, fix facilities, and run basic PD. There's rarely anything left over. State agencies and institution staffs are shrinking too. While it's a challenge, more money would certainly be great!

Kaitlin LeMoine: In an effort to bring this conversation full circle, Kate, given that our podcast is called Work Forces, what would you recommend to educators, employers, or policymakers who want to become forces in expanding access to high-quality CTE?

Kate Kreamer: First and foremost, if you haven't seen a CTE program recently, go see one in action. Call a local high school or community college, or reach out to your state director to take you on a tour. There is still a major perception gap around what CTE is today versus what it used to be. People ask if it's in school or out of school, or assume it's only traditional trades. It includes cybersecurity, healthcare, engineering, and advanced manufacturing. I can advocate and make the case every day, but until you go and see modern CTE in person, it is hard to fully believe it.

Julian Alssid: In addition to going to see it, how can our listeners learn more about your work and follow Advance CTE?

Kate Kreamer: Look us up at careertech.org, where you can sign up for updates and our legislative policy emails. We put out a lot of great resources. You can also find Advance CTE and Kate Kreamer on LinkedIn, where we elevate our work, our members' work, and broader field efforts.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Kate. It's been such an insightful conversation, and we look forward to staying connected and watching your work unfold.

Kate Kreamer: Thank you so much again. I look forward to that as well.

Julian Alssid: Thank you, Kate.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and especially thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you are interested in learning more about the Work Forces consulting practice, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Adam Goldfarb, Founding Executive Director of Opportunity AI, a collaborative of more than 100 foundations focused on AI's impact on jobs and economic mobility, discusses how philanthropy and the social sector can work together to ensure AI expands rather than narrows economic opportunity. Drawing on his experience leading Schmidt Futures' workforce technology initiative and co-founding Opportunity AI, Adam maps the emerging landscape of economic opportunity funders into four distinct camps: those focused on worker voice and governance, those preparing transition systems for potential disruption, those building AI-powered tools for the social sector, and those watching the growing entry of wealth from the AI industry itself. The conversation explores the most promising categories of AI use cases in workforce development, from career navigation tools and AI-powered coaching to benefits access and operational efficiency for nonprofits, and why philanthropy needs real-time labor market observability to detect how AI is reshaping jobs and skills before it's too late to respond. Adam also makes the case that agility, for workers, training organizations, and funders alike, may be the defining touchstone of this era, and offers a vision for how the sector can move faster and more experimentally without losing sight of the learners it exists to serve.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so, with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: As we continue Season 7, there is one topic that has come to dominate virtually every conversation we have in our consulting work, on this podcast, and frankly, everywhere we turn: artificial intelligence. The central question for our field isn't whether AI will change the nature of work and learning; it will. The question is how can we harness these tools in ways that genuinely expand economic opportunity for the people who need it most.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And that question puts a real responsibility on the organizations and individuals who are in a position to shape how this moment unfolds. Funders, policymakers, and practitioners all have a role to play, and getting it right requires deliberate strategy and coordination, a willingness to move faster than maybe ever before, and a clear-eyed view of both the challenges and opportunities that come with AI tools as they emerge.

Julian Alssid: Which brings us to our guest today. Adam Goldfarb is the founding executive director of Opportunity AI, a collaborative of more than 100 foundations focused on AI's impact on jobs and economic mobility. Before starting Opportunity AI, Adam launched and led Eric and Wendy Schmidt's grant-making program devoted to innovation and career training. Earlier in his career, Adam served as chief of staff of a state education agency, co-founded a charter high school, coordinated policy advocacy for the city of Newark, New Jersey, and led strategy for national nonprofits. Adam, welcome to Work Forces. We are so glad to have you with us.

Adam Goldfarb: Thank you. It's amazing to be here. You know, all the longtime listener, first time caller, notes apply here. Thanks. So thank you.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We're so glad you can join us today, Adam. We really appreciate it and look forward to diving in with you. As we get started, please tell us a bit more about your background and your current role at Opportunity AI.

Adam Goldfarb: So, Julian, as you mentioned, I spent most of my early career working for mayors and governors. I did economic development policy for the city of Newark, New Jersey. I was chief of staff of the Connecticut Education Department, and the origin story here is: while I was in Newark, as you mentioned, I co-founded a high school, served as the board chair, and this was a school you're familiar with. You know, we did everything in our power to prepare a group of low income high school students to get into and to succeed in college. And long story short, we had great college acceptance rates, rates that beat the odds, and which were a wonderful achievement for the students, but relatively poor college completion rates. And I had personally, I think, underestimated the barriers that the traditional postsecondary system throws in front of low-income first-gen students. And so I think, like a lot of us, that inspired me to begin working on shorter-term interventions that can help low-income students get their first upwardly mobile job, achieve economic freedom. And so I took on roles in that space, and that's what led me eventually to Schmidt Futures, which was Eric and Wendy Schmidt's philanthropy. That's when I met you, Julian. I was helping them rethink their shared prosperity work. We had a program using technology to help workforce training entities improve their growth and scalability with your help. So yeah, I got to work with a lot of the most amazing organizations in our space. Organizations that I think your listeners are really familiar with: Social Finance, Empower, Propel America, Craft Education System, Upwardly Global. But what happened was, this takes us into 2023, and AI starts to grab the headlines, right, with ChatGPT coming out. And for me, and for I think a bunch of my colleagues who found themselves in grant maker roles, this was like an "oh crap" moment. I could imagine my boss calling me and saying, "What's your AI strategy? How does this change what we're doing with your program?" And I wasn't really sure. I don't come from a technical background. I wasn't really sure what I would say, and it was leading to a lot of crises of confidence of like, how can we deign to support this if we don't know the answer to that question? And so what happened was, I and the head of grant making at GitLab Foundation, whose name is Matt Ziegler—I think you had Ellie Bertani on a previous episode, right—so Matt and I started trading notes on what the two of us were reading about AI, and we pulled in some of our friends and we said, "Let's go on a regular Zoom." And those Zooms just sort of eventually became the community that became what we call now Opportunity AI, which we spun out with the help of a bunch of foundations in the space, like Gates and Comcast and Segal and Workday Foundation and Annie E. Casey, some others. And so today, those first Zooms have spawned a funder collaborative. We have over 200 members, as you mentioned, drawn from over 100 foundations. And Opportunity AI is trying to solve a problem that is endemic in philanthropy and long term in philanthropy, but that is becoming more acute. We think that the social sector, nonprofits, impact organizations that may be organized as for-profits, have a huge role to play in helping workers and learners adapt and succeed in the AI era. And for that to happen, funders have to step up to the plate. But unfortunately, economic opportunity funders are, on average, like me, not technical. We're not like former software engineers. We know a thing or two, hopefully, about economic opportunity and modalities there. So, how are we going to keep up with AI's developments given those non-technical backgrounds? And then two, philanthropy is just famously fragmented and super slow. You have too many duplicate efforts. We make would-be grantee partners deal with too much rigmarole. We descend into strategy refresh processes that take months and years, and so Opportunity AI is trying to be the collaboration infrastructure to solve those problems. We're helping funders learn and take action together in the economic opportunity world. We do that by learning, right? So our funders come together, they meet with the most cutting-edge practitioners, they hear from the frontier labs themselves, they learn about what's going well and what's not going well in use cases around AI in economic opportunity, and we bring funds together to align their funding and to craft new multi-donor projects together.

Julian Alssid: You may not be techie, but you certainly have immersed yourself a bit now

Adam Goldfarb: Yes

Julian Alssid: in this brave new world. So we'd like to start broad and dig deeper, beginning with hearing from you about just your observations of how the AI funder and practitioner landscape has evolved over the past few years, and what shifts you are seeing.

Adam Goldfarb: I think there are a few phenomena. I'm curious what you guys think. So one is just the simplest one: growth, growth of interest. Our community has grown. I think that you may not have thought of yourself as a practitioner or a funder as an AI funder or an AI practitioner, but suddenly you are finding yourself trying to place workers into an AI-inflected job market, and so you have found yourself—you may not have known this at first—but you are that. And so just growth of interest in the space relative to those origins I mentioned in '23. And the second thing, and I think this is a big difference from 2023 and 2024, it can seem from the outside, I feel like you go to a funder's website, a practitioner's website, and it just sounds like everyone's using the same words in a slightly different order about something happening with AI and something happening with economic opportunity. I do think that it's possible to parse the funders into a few discrete camps. They're all friendly, they're all overlapping, but there are groups of funders trying to answer different questions. Okay, and so one camp that we see is what I call the voice camp, and they're basically asking: who gets a say in how AI is built and governed? Okay, and with these folks you'll see programs related to worker power, community agency, and what should the guardrails be on big tech. There are amazing funders in our community that I really admire in this space: Kaphan, Irvine in California, Omidyar; and some of those funders have come together to launch a coalition that your listeners have probably heard of called Humanity AI. And there's a preexisting organization called Families and Workers Fund that is prominent in this realm. So there's that voice camp. And then we're seeing another camp, especially this year, that we think of as the quote-unquote bridge camp, and they're asking: are transition systems ready for AI's potential disruptions? Right. So these are funders who want to make sure that the unemployment insurance system is up to snuff for what could be a different shape of job disruption in this economy. You're seeing funders partner with state governments, with the NGA, to help governors shift their strategies in light of the regional economies that they're in. In particular in this space, former Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo has founded something called the Raise Us Coalition, which is a very impressive, sophisticated effort in this space. Gary Community Ventures in Colorado is another philanthropy very adept at partnering with government and helping them make this transition. And then the third camp that I'd say, and this is where a lot of Opportunity AI members in particular resonate, these are the builders, okay? And these folks are asking: what tools can the social sector build? How can the social sector adapt itself, the nonprofit community especially, to the AI era? These funders are longtime funders of direct service organizations, and they're asking how this adaptation can happen. You've seen Next Ladder Ventures, a prominent multi-donor effort launched by Gates, Valhalla, a few others, GitLab Foundation, where Ellie and my co-founder Matt come from. So there's this camp focused on: let's help the social sector itself adapt, let's help the social sector use AI tools to go farther with their programming. And then the last camp that sort of has to be mentioned, but it's too early to speak too much about it, is just the present and coming entry of wealth from the AI industry itself. OpenAI Foundation has recently announced itself; it has a corpus of funds by virtue of the nonprofit/corporate setup of OpenAI that is bigger than many of the biggest other philanthropies in the United States combined, like 130 billion dollars in assets that they're launching with. And so, as they and as other folks from the AI industry enter the space, it's going to shift what's possible quite a bit. So this is just an emerging trend worth watching. It's really interesting to see these camps emerging and coalescing. And what we're hoping is that Opportunity AI can be a place where these funders can come together and make sure that they are acting harmoniously, not duplicating efforts, and trading notes.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It's really interesting to hear you break down the different funder archetypes in those groups across those themes. I feel like it must be very interesting from your vantage point to see over a few years these different affinity groups evolve, recognizing that of course there's some overlap, but really interesting to hear you break them out in that way. I'm curious, Adam, what are the current leading categories of AI use cases you're seeing across training, education, and adjacent areas too, like access to benefits?

Adam Goldfarb: I think we are seeing a lot of tool building happening, especially from that final category that I mentioned, the builders…

Kaitlin LeMoine: The builders, yeah.

Adam Goldfarb: Funders who are funding that kind of work, and so I do think there are phenomena emerging here too, right? So one of them is navigation; career navigation is emerging as this meta category, a category of categories of initiatives. As you know, so much of the magic of an amazing career intervention, whether it's at a community college or a workforce training organization, is embodied in the career coach, the person who helps you think about your job search strategy. They're tailoring your resume. Maybe they're also helping you deal with the balance of life and your job search and your training. They help you understand what an informational interview is, all these weird rituals that make up ways to enter the labor market. And so there's a lot of optimism, temperate optimism, that software can help capture some of the magic of a career coach in your pocket. You can imagine a digital coach that knows your regional labor market data really well, knows your pre-existing credentials really well, knows the training options in your area, knows which ones have high ROI and which ones are a little more dubious. And especially exciting is imagining the agentic application tier, where that piece of software in your pocket can take action on your behalf, right, can say, "I know you're a little shy about this career transition you're trying to make, but there's a networking event that has no bus transfers in your area that I can sign you up for right now," and sort of start to get you exposure into this field. So some of these navigation tools are being built to be learner-facing, and some are being built to be career coach-facing to enable a career coach to serve more people and more effectively. And it makes sense why this is an exciting use case, right, because AI is really good at the matching problem, taking a big mess of data and making sense of it. In New York State, there are 900 apprenticeship programs, and there's a matching problem between apprenticeship seeker and apprenticeship provider, and matching problems are something AI is just really well suited for. Another use case within career navigation is AI is really good at giving you fleshed-out examples of something, right? We all have fun with AI saying, "read this to me in this voice" or "translate The Odyssey into modern vernacular." And so, as a supplemental tutor, AI has a lot of value in throwing low-pressure at-bats at a learner with practice problems. Climb Together is a nonprofit whose chatbot helps low-income students at community colleges have the chance to practice informational interviews, which is, as I mentioned before, a very odd ritual: how do you talk about yourself and your skills in this very ritualized way where you don't sound so into yourself, and you're making a connection with the person across the desk? AI can throw at-bats at you and provide you that simulation. So all of those fall in that bucket of career navigation, where there's a lot of promise, though there's a lot of peril—we have to make sure that the data being fed into the tools is good enough, etc. So career navigation is sort of a meta category. And then you mentioned access to benefits, right? Government does not make it easy for us to navigate its systems. There's a thicket of eligibility rules, there are weird forms, there are benefits cliffs where if you sign up for these programs, it makes you ineligible for those. So AI can help people navigate the UI system and other stability systems to provide the job seeker with stability during their job search. Here in New Jersey, just translating the forms into Spanish increased applications by 172 percent—people who were always eligible, but the system just didn't speak their language, and it was labor-intensive for us to translate all of the various interfaces that a person would experience. Another really interesting use case: different items in the grocery store are eligible for food assistance programs or not based on whether they're classified as food or junk food. And it's annoying to have to carry those items to the register and find out whether this sparkling water is classified as soda or sparkling water. And so, another organization in our space, Propel, lets you scan the barcode, and it tells you the eligibility of that product. So just exciting things that AI can make possible. And then the last thing I'll say is social sector organizations who are building are using AI to help themselves reach more students at scale at a reasonable cost. AI can absorb the repeatable, annoying parts of human services and free up the teacher at a job training program from so much paper grading to just being the deliverer of content. If we help every social sector organization realize an operational efficiency enhancement, the dollars that we put towards the social sector can go farther. So broadly, enabling scale is an exciting, non-glamorous way that AI is going to enhance our space.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, it's really incredible seeing the emerging applications in our field, and at the same time, there is a lot of worry, a lot of concern, particularly that AI is going to reduce job opportunities or certainly change work as we know it as more tasks become automated. How is philanthropy working to address this issue?

Adam Goldfarb: I think that philanthropic activity in this space is going to be very significant. This is an area that's just not in the headlines yet that people don't know about, because this is a big problem. There are these doomsday predictions that make the headlines sometimes from people who know the technology best, that a white-collar jobs apocalypse is coming. There's disagreement between sort of the people at the frontier labs making those predictions and labor economists, and we want the people in our sector—the head of curriculum at a community college, a workforce board director—to be able to know how demand is shifting in their regions, how AI may be augmenting or automating various skills, and how that's changing the demand for various occupations, and how a given job description may look different than it did six months ago in light of AI's effect on the technology relevant in that space. Government data products are not equal to this task. There's too much of a lag, and they're not adept at spotting disparate effects across companies or across regional labor markets. A company in one city may automate a certain function, and the identical company across town may not automate it. It's uneven, and we can't see those phenomena in the national statistics. And so I am hearing from funders—we had 80 funders together in Washington a couple of weeks ago—that this conversation is really moving forward. Philanthropy and the social sector would like to partner together to create an observability function, where the practitioners that we care about the most have greater observability into AI's effects on jobs and skills as they unfold in a given labor market: by data infrastructure work to make data more available to tools, by tool building itself to make sense of that data, and by funding research. This will enable us to see the unpredictable ways in which AI is affecting jobs and skills, and enable us to adapt accordingly. We had Molly Kinder speak to us in DC, who is recently of the Brookings Institution, and she pointed out that there were these predictions of labor market disruption particular to a certain type of coding job, but meanwhile, it's clerical and administrative work that is seeing the biggest exposure to AI automation, and a lot of those roles are traditionally female-coded in the labor market. We're just not ready for it; we don't have the detection tools to assess whether those things are happening and how government policy and nonprofit response has to react accordingly. And so there's going to be a lot of energy entering that problem space.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and even I would imagine the lag of the information, as you said—thinking back over the last three years, if your data collection efforts are from last year, we're even more behind than ever before with respect to how seemingly within weeks things can shift around how jobs or roles can be impacted. I would imagine that's a really challenging piece of this as well.

Adam Goldfarb: Yeah, and like a lot of your listeners probably subscribe to Lightcast, there are tools available, but we just need more data brought to bear here, and we need more tools to make sense of the data. The AI labs themselves, for example, have proprietary data on how people are actually using AI tools in given occupations, and so we need the right sort of data sharing agreements to extract some of that to help us use the predictive power of that.

Julian Alssid: Well, as with earlier technological innovation, there'll be jobs that we don't know exist, and so while clearly a lot of the simpler tasks are automated, and that clearly impacts less skilled and younger workers, for example, we really don't entirely know where this goes.

Adam Goldfarb: Exactly. One probable and exciting shift here amid all this concern about the negative effects is that it does seem very likely that AI could lead to a surge in solopreneurship and folks hanging out their own shingle trying something, that the barriers to entering the labor market and entering entrepreneurship are lower. Workday Foundation has a big partnership in this space around encouraging AI-powered solopreneurship. I feel like more workers will find themselves in those kinds of roles than before.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Building off of we don't know where we're headed exactly, but despite that, Adam, what advice would you offer to education and workforce leaders who want to move forward thoughtfully in this unpredictable and ever-shifting environment?

Adam Goldfarb: So I do think that there is a potential shift here that may help actors in our sector get through this. Over the last decade, we've seen the emergence of these touchstone ideas in our sector. There was a skills conversation—every learner needs hard-edged skills, reactive to labor market demand, industry-recognized certifications. That was a moment that very much dominated the conversation. Then there was a broadening of that conversation to say the hard skills conversation needs to be rounded out by durable skills, or skills that aren't technical in nature, and that we need to imbue our learners with social capital, like our ability to find a job. So our sector has responded to frailties in the way it works by embracing these sort of touchstones. And I think—this is an idea that I've been working on with a colleague at an organization called CareerVillage, Jared Chung—it's very possible that an emerging touchstone for this coming era is captured in the word agility. I think up and down the spectrum, from job seeker and worker to workforce training organization that serves those workers to the funders fueling those job training organizations, we're going to embrace the term agility in new ways. So, what does that mean? For workers and job seekers, AI might cause all of our roles to shift more often. We may keep the same job title, but what that job title means changes as AI augments certain subtasks and automates others. People might change careers more often. We're all living longer, so we may be changing careers more often as well. And for many of us, when that happens, that does violence to our sense of our own self-identity, and it's stressful to switch careers and to have your role change. So we may need fresh thinking about how we imbue workers and job seekers with an agile mindset where we're picking up skills on the side, we're happy to experiment, we roll with the punches when some of these transitions happen—not to minimize how actually life-altering and tragic some of these transitions can be, we know that from past waves of innovation, but that this may be a helpful mindset to imbue. And then for the workforce training organizations, they need to be more agile as well. They need to stand up new programs in response to probably faster-shifting labor market demand, and they need to jettison programs with no sentimentality that are no longer meeting the moment. They need to use AI to make their internal operations more efficient so that they can act with more agility in light of greater uncertainty. We want all of our cherished community colleges and workforce training organizations that produce these odds-beating results for their learners to thrive through this era, and that might be part of what it takes. And I think for my sector, funders need to become more agile as well. We can't get lost in these years-long strategy refreshes. We can't be paralyzed by the uncertainty that it's not clear which skills are going to be relevant when. I think funders can step into this space with more shorter-term, more experimental grant making, where each shorter-term grant making sort of produces evidence that informs the next round. We can shift capital toward models with the best evidence in that way. We need to fund differently as well. As more organizations become builders, that changes the way the cadence of funding has to work. There's this old-fashioned way of "we'll give you a million dollars in four equal tranches, and you only get the second tranche after you meet a bunch of criteria for how the first tranche went." But an organization building technology has to front-load their acquisition of technical talent. So the cadence of funding needs to be responsive to the kinds of tasks that social sector organizations are taking on right now. Fast Forward is an organization in the Bay Area that has amazing playbooks about this, both for grantees and grant makers. So there are a bunch of shifts that I feel like our sector could take to better meet the moment, and it's possible that agility could be a term that unifies the shifts that are needed.

Julian Alssid: Well, Adam, as we wind down our conversation, it's clear that you have your finger on the pulse here, so we're going to be counting on you to be both agile and keep us all abreast of all the shifts and iterations taking place in the world. No pressure.

Adam Goldfarb: I'll do my best.

Julian Alssid: How can our listeners learn more about your work and follow what Opportunity AI is doing?

Adam Goldfarb: We don't have a massive or sophisticated online presence. We give folks a sense of what we're up to over on LinkedIn. Always happy to compare notes with folks. If you are an economic opportunity funder interested in joining other funders on their AI learning journey, I'm extremely excited to connect—please reach out if that describes you. And I think in the coming few months and year, we're going to be supporting a few bigger collaborative projects, things that individual funders can't achieve on their own, but that we can achieve by collective action, so folks can stay tuned for updates on those projects.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and to share what you're seeing emerge across this complex and exciting moment in time. And yeah, we do look forward to continuing to follow your efforts in this next chapter.

Adam Goldfarb: Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to keep the conversation going.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation, and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Work Forces consulting, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Alexandra Simon, Senior Policy Analyst with the Center on Education and Labor at New America and a key contributor to the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA), discusses what it takes to build youth apprenticeship programs that are rigorous, equitable, and ready to scale. Drawing on her experience leading technical assistance for U.S. Department of Labor Youth Apprenticeship Readiness Grants and her recent report "Employers Report Four Indirect Benefits of Youth Apprenticeship," Alexandra reframes youth apprenticeship not just as a talent pipeline strategy, but as an organizational development investment that strengthens managers, renews employee engagement, and improves training systems across the board. The conversation explores how youth apprenticeship differs from internships and other work-based learning experiences, why the field looks so different from state to state and community to community, and what it takes to bring employers to the table. Alexandra also walks through PAYA's five quality principles for high-quality youth apprenticeship, makes the case for starting small and building toward programs that prepare young people for both college and career, and offers practical guidance for educators, employers, and policymakers who want to expand access to youth apprenticeships in their own communities.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Welcome to Season 7 of Work Forces. As we head into a new season and a new school year, we're excited to kick off the season by further exploring a theme that has been running through our recent podcast conversations: the growing recognition that career preparation can't wait until the end of a student's journey. Whether we're talking about gateway courses in higher education or career and technical education at the secondary level, there is increasing momentum around the idea that young people need earlier, more scaffolded exposure to the world of work.

Julian Alssid: That's right, Kaitlin. And yet, as promising as that momentum is, the field is far from uniform. Youth apprenticeship, one of the most rigorous models we have for connecting young people to careers, is taking many forms. And employers, even those who want to engage, don't always see a clear path to doing so.

So the question isn't just what are the various ways to engage learners in early career preparation. It's how we build pathways that are coherent enough to scale, rigorous enough to mean something, and compelling enough to bring employers to the table.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And all of this brings us to our guest today. Alexandra Simon is a senior policy analyst with the Center on Education and Labor at New America, where she supports youth transitions from high school to post-secondary education and careers.

Alexandra contributes to the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship, known as PAYA, through research, technical assistance, and strategic communications, and has spent her career working at the intersection of youth apprenticeship, work-based learning, and career pathways. Before joining New America, she led technical assistance for US Departments of Education and Labor initiatives focused on youth apprenticeship, work-based learning, and career pathways. And she began her career as a high school Spanish teacher.

Alexandra, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us to kick off our new season.

Alexandra Simon: It's a pleasure to be here.

Julian Alssid: So glad you've taken the time to join us. And to kick things off, if you will, tell us in your own words about your background and the path that brought you to your current role at New America.

Alexandra Simon: After teaching in several states and overseas, I transitioned into the nonprofit space. And I had the opportunity to lead the technical assistance for US Department of Labor's Youth Apprenticeship Readiness Grants, which kicked off in 2020 and ran through 2024. And that's where I really became passionate about youth apprenticeship. I like to say I drank the apprenticeship Kool-Aid.

Since then, my work has expanded to include not only youth apprenticeship, but also more broadly, career and technical education, work-based learning, dual enrollment, and other pathways work that really help young people successfully transition from high school to college and careers. And today at New America, I support the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship, PAYA for short, through research, technical assistance, strategic communications, and also working with grantees who are implementing the boots-on-the-ground youth apprenticeships.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Youth apprenticeship, I feel like it can be used interchangeably with other terms or feel similar to other terms we often hear in this space, like internships or work-based learning or pre-apprenticeships. Can you help us understand what youth apprenticeships are, what makes them distinct, and where PAYA and the definitions created through PAYA fit within that broader landscape?

Alexandra Simon: So I'm going to start with the broadest term here, which is work-based learning. And that really spans a continuum from things like short-term experiences, like job shadowing, or maybe having guest speakers come to schools from employers to talk about their organizations or certain jobs. And then that continuum goes all the way to more sustained activities like internships. And then on the far side, apprenticeships, which was a really good lead-in earlier to explain how rigorous and aligned with occupations apprenticeships can be.

So let's look from the perspective of a young person. An internship for a young person, I think the biggest distinction or confusion becomes between an internship and apprenticeship. So I'm going to break that down. An internship's really a chance to explore a career and gain experience. But an apprenticeship is a pathway into a career, a specific occupation where you're hired from the start.

You receive structured training, you have a mentor that you're paired with to help you learn this occupation, and you build the skills needed for that occupation while earning a wage. Oftentimes you hear this term "earn and learn." So you're immediately an employee of the company and you're also learning on the job through on-the-job training. And I think this really matters because apprenticeships and internships are designed to achieve different goals, right?

If an employer simply wants to identify some promising talent, an internship might be enough. But if they're struggling to find workers with specialized, hands-on skills, an apprenticeship really allows them to grow that talent themselves. And so I want people to think of internships and apprenticeships as complementary tools, not competing ones, but they are very different in that way.

And so I think our work at New America, we have defined what a quality youth apprenticeship is. And I think our version of youth apprenticeship is very specific because youth apprenticeship from PAYA's perspective should start when a youth is between the ages of 16 to 18, like high school age. A lot of youth apprenticeships do start in high school. Some of them might start right at the tail end of high school, so you're identifying that you're going to go into a youth apprenticeship, but you're maybe not starting it until right towards the end of high school for various reasons.

Julian Alssid: So to dig deeper into apprenticeships then, you recently wrote a report about the indirect benefits of youth apprenticeship that employers experience and gain from participating in youth apprenticeship programs. Great if you would walk us through that report, the key findings, and what surprised you the most?

Alexandra Simon: So the findings from the report, what they really do is reframe youth apprenticeship not just as a talent pipeline strategy, which is how we often look at it, but also as an organizational development strategy for employers. I would say the biggest takeaways from our research were that employers defined benefits that went far beyond filling that future pipeline. And for this report, we did interview six employers across IT and advanced manufacturing; they were training youth apprentices in those two sectors and occupations.

And while they definitely valued developing this future talent, we heard from employers about how youth apprenticeship actually made their existing organizations stronger. And so there's not a lot done on youth apprenticeship specifically. There's a lot of return on investment or ROI studies on apprenticeship more broadly, but we really wanted to dig into indirect benefits that are harder to quantify.

So that's what we did for this study, and we really identified four major indirect benefits from the interviews that we conducted with employers. And I'll start off with how youth apprenticeship really renewed employee engagement. We had mentors and also just co-workers who worked alongside the youth apprentices describe a real sense of pride and purpose in helping young people succeed. It created what many coined this "proud parent effect," where it's just exciting to work alongside young people and to see them hit milestones in their lives and be a part of that process.

I'd say the second, and I found most surprising finding, was the manager development finding. Across broader apprenticeship research, we do see that developing managers is considered like a nice bonus. But in youth apprenticeship, it actually emerges as one of the strongest and most consistent findings across every employer that we interviewed, as opposed to just being like a middle-of-the-pack finding in general apprenticeship research. It's a leading finding across youth apprenticeships.

And I really think that's because when you're working with youth, they need really intentional coaching, feedback, and opportunities. The supervision looks a little bit different. And I think people, honestly, from speaking with the employers, they're really thoughtful about understanding that there's different learning styles, that youth might need additional support. And so as a result, these employers were building leadership skills like communication, empathy, coaching, giving feedback to youth in ways that maybe they wouldn't think about giving feedback to an adult to make sure that they're really learning during their apprenticeship.

I think it's an important thing to consider that perspective. And also these things are really valuable in today's workplace—the ability to communicate with people and to be able to give this level of feedback. So in many ways, we see youth apprenticeship was really developing two types of talent at the same time, right? So they're developing the apprentice themselves, but they're also developing the mentor because those individuals were improving upon their skills. And some of them may not have been managers before.

The third finding was that apprentices sparked collaboration. So if you speak with young people today, you might know that they have different ideas than people our age. And so they might bring in challenges to assumptions that adults have already made. And sometimes that even went further than just the actual organization. Some of the work that was coming out of youth apprenticeships actually moved across regional ecosystems, coming together with other organizations or employers to build deeper this youth apprenticeship landscape in their local community.

And finally, every single employer did say that youth apprenticeship raised the quality of their training because they had to make it accessible to young people. What they did was they built better onboarding, they built clearer frameworks and more structured learning materials. And the interesting part about this is that it didn't just benefit the apprentices; a lot of these organizations actually adopted these materials for their overall onboarding. And so it ended up improving training for organizations, not just for their youth apprentices, but also for their organization as a whole.

So I really think that the broad message from this study is that youth apprenticeship isn't just an investment in young people, it's actually an investment in the organization itself. And so when employers think about building this talent pipeline, they can also leave with stronger managers, better training systems, and more engaged employees who get excited about going to work because they are training that next generation. They are passing on the skills that they've learned, their knowledge.

I mentioned that that manager development finding really surprised me the most because we did expect employers to talk about future talent, but we didn't really expect every single employer to talk about how mentoring apprentices accelerated leadership for their current employees. So that's really seen as a secondary benefit, but in this case for youth apprenticeship, it's one of the defining outcomes of our study.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So when you were conducting this study, I'm curious to know, where kind of how far and how deep into the process were the employers that you spoke to around the implementation of youth apprenticeships? Because it seems like there has to be some infrastructure in place, there has to be some existing policies, procedures, I would imagine, in order to really get these programs running smoothly. Would just love to get a better sense of where were the employers in that process that you had spoken to and any other insights you'd offer, maybe to employers who have thought about starting youth apprenticeships, but maybe are looking to dip their toe in the water around how to go about doing this. Because like these indirect benefits are amazing, but how far down the path do you need to be to start to feel those indirect benefits and what needs to be in place?

Alexandra Simon: That's a great question. And honestly, it was one of the first things that we considered when we started to plan for this research. And so we had to shift our parameters a little bit because I think we were a little bit ambitious. Let's talk to employers who've been working with youth apprentices for like four or more years and are serving at least two to fifteen apprentices at a time.

And then we narrowed it down to employers who'd worked with youth apprentices for two years or longer. And part of that is that you're right, this is something that can be a little bit challenging to find employers who have been doing it maybe for a little bit longer. But in our case, it was because we wanted to be careful in the sample that we were looking at. So we decided to make it more occupation-specific: employers who were working within what we call an emerging field, which we felt was IT or information technology occupations, and then an established field, which was advanced manufacturing, and just really see if maybe an apprenticeship field like advanced manufacturing that's been around for a long time had differences in how their youth apprenticeships benefited their organization versus organizations that might have newer apprenticeship programs like information technology.

But we ended up making sure that they met these bare minimums so that we had something across the board where we could say, we didn't want someone who just started a program, it was their first year, but someone who had been doing it for at least two years. And I think it was really helpful. And I'd say in future iterations, if we want to dive deeper, expanding to make sure that we do include employers who are training youth apprentices in other occupations.

Julian Alssid: Did you get a sense of how employers are even becoming involved with youth apprenticeship? When looking across the country, first of all, apprenticeship is one thing, but the idea of youth apprenticeships is a whole other ballgame. And I do think that for many employers, the perception is that this is a heavy lift, it's a lot of work, how do you do it? And then with respect to youth apprenticeships, states vary in what they even consider youth apprenticeships. So how are employers getting involved? And can you speak a little bit to the types of employers that are being drawn to this?

Alexandra Simon: The types of employers really vary. You have small employers that might only employ one or two youth apprentices at a time ever because that's really their capacity, their small business. And then you have employers that are maybe even on the Fortune 500 list who are looking at youth apprenticeship as building their talent in larger cities, and they don't want to miss out on the opportunity to train young people. And I think they're seeing a lot of benefits from the cultural impacts as well.

But getting employers on board is definitely one of the biggest challenges in youth apprenticeship. I think organizations that are, for example, originally European-based, maybe they're more familiar with the apprenticeship model, and so the idea of creating a youth apprenticeship program is not so foreign. They're like, yes, they've done that before, just in another country, and so now they're willing to do that here.

I really think the best way that employers get involved in youth apprenticeship is when there's really a need for their industry and for their organization. They're seeing a talent shortage and it is a clear path to filling that talent shortage, but it is a little bit of a long-term game, right? You're not just getting someone to come on board who's going to be trained in six weeks, go through boot camp—no, that's not the apprenticeship model.

But what they see as the benefit when it's outlined for them is that you get this different level of understanding about an organization when you go through an apprenticeship. You build strong connections with an organization; as the young person, you have a different sense of loyalty and there's a different level of engagement company-wide that we saw in this study by all the individuals that work in an organization that train apprentices. It's also really a way to ensure that someone that you hire is going to learn the job the way that you need it to be done because you're training them from essentially the ground up to learn this specific occupation.

And that's why it has a lot of success and a lot of positive outcomes. Because when a young person agrees to do a youth apprenticeship in a specific field, whether it's IT, advanced manufacturing, maybe healthcare, which is another emerging industry, they know that they're going to leave trained to do that job and that either the employer themselves is likely to hire them or they're in a local community where that's a need. Like, for example, healthcare—we know that's a huge need that just continues to grow in our country, and so there will be jobs that will align and the employer will have jobs also available for that young person.

So I think it's just really making sure that the employer is aligned with understanding the labor market, the possibilities that come from training young people. And I would say there's also a bit of—I don't really necessarily think it's risk-taking, but it's not that common. So employers, when they hear from other employers, that helps so much. When they hear about success, like "we started a youth apprenticeship program, and this is what we're seeing as the outcomes for our participants," that really helps employers understand and get on board when they're looking to potentially start a program.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So PAYA is approaching its 10th anniversary as a partnership. And we understand there's significant investment flowing into the apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship space. How do we think about scaling youth apprenticeships, recognizing, like you said, so much of the variability that exists? PAYA has some existing quality principles and a guide, but how do we think about scaling this effort, because like you said, some of the challenges are that it takes people a while to get going. And then what is transferable? What are transferable learnings, and what is really truly specific to one employer or one region or one state? Would love to hear you riff on that a little bit.

Alexandra Simon: Yeah, so I think we're really at an exciting moment right now with the investments in youth apprenticeship from organizations like Bloomberg Philanthropies and Siemens, who has this Careers Electric initiative. And it's really just such a great opportunity. But when you talk about scale, I think it's really a reminder that how we scale matters just as much as how fast we scale. And that's really where PAYA's quality principles come in.

To me, they're really the gold standard for designing youth apprenticeship programs and systems. The five quality principles—and I'm just going to quickly go through them, but you can find them on the New America website if you want to dig in deeper—emphasize that programs should be career-oriented, equitable, portable, adaptable, and accountable. And that really helps ensure that youth apprenticeship isn't just another work-based learning experience, but that it's a high-quality pathway that prepares young people—and I want to really push this—for both college and careers.

A lot of times we hear "or college or career," but high-quality youth apprenticeship will prepare you for both. And so that's really something to grow towards. And I think that communities get overwhelmed when you see these principles or when you learn about what goes into a youth apprenticeship because there are a lot of different factors like the on-the-job training, the related technical instruction, having a mentor. But communities don't have to have every principle from PAYA realized on day one.

For example, building that transferable college credit that we push might take a year or more to build that partnership between the community college system and the K through 12 system and the employer to make sure that you're getting those courses right, that you have the instructors that can teach those courses, and how they fit in with the high school curriculum that's already there. So what I think is really important is that the principles guide the work from the start, but know that you don't have to check every single box on day one.

And growing youth apprenticeship programs, the most successful programs that I have seen from working with grantees, from working with organizations that we partner with to showcase their work, they start small. They don't start with 50 youth apprentices; they start with one or two. And so I'm really encouraged that a lot of these investments are understanding that you have to start at the beginning. So you're actually looking at career technical education and how can we get more courses aligned with the occupations or fields that are in need, whether it's the skilled trades or pre-apprenticeships, to prepare young people to go into an apprenticeship ahead of time.

And I also really like that a lot of these investments are mirroring PAYA's approach in many ways, like focusing on sectors: skilled trades, healthcare, information technology. And I think that sector-based strategy really helps employers collaborate. It's going to create a stronger career pathway for a student because it's very concrete that they're going into a specific sector they're interested in. And I think ultimately this level of cooperation in the sectors will make programs more sustainable over time. So I really think that the two big things that I would push are: know that you can start small, and know that you want to be able to make sure that youth apprenticeships prepare young people for both college and career.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Recognizing that youth apprenticeships draw on, as is in PAYA's name, partnership across employers and educational institutions, where do you find that the youth apprenticeships tend to stem from? Where does the conversation start? Because it feels like it could start with a high school, an employer, or an industry association of some kind. Do you find that there are common places where the idea of youth apprenticeship originates in different communities, or does it range?

Alexandra Simon: I think it's really a range from my experience. For example, when I look at our grantees that we support in developing, building, and sustaining youth apprenticeships, they really run the gamut. So we have, for example, school districts, community-based organizations, intermediaries, and employers. And so I think one of the things that when we give youth apprenticeship 101 training to folks is that there's always someone in the middle who's functioning as an intermediary.

Intermediary can mean so many things, but essentially they're the person that's linking everyone together. And so then you also have a combination of the K-12 system, the higher ed system—because we want to have those college credits and courses, dual enrollment—and then you also have the employer, and you might also have an intermediary. But where we've seen the leadership happen, it could be a community college system.

Trident Technical College is a great example. They kind of spearheaded the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship system, and they're a community college system that brings together three school districts in their area that all work together to build, develop, and sustain these youth apprenticeships with employers. And the employers have been a key part of building the apprenticeship system in Charleston. So I think really what you just asked, it works best when everyone comes to the table.

And it's actually much harder to do when it's only a K to 12 school system or when it's only a community college, because you need to work collaboratively to really have a successful program and you need to work with all those entities from the beginning. It's really hard if like a community college system and a K to 12 system come together and say, "we want to do youth apprenticeship for our students." I think that's fabulous, but we need industry there, we need to have the employer, it needs to really be aligned.

Where I see a lot of opportunity is looking at what already exists in K-12 in career technical education and what's the labor market need for communities on the local level. And can we align that? Because I do think it's a lot easier, working with grantees over the years, to build something when there's already a foundation—if there's already, for example, a pathway in education or in healthcare in the high school CTE program. And then you have an employer that has a need—and it might actually be the K to 12 school system that needs educators or paraprofessionals, right?

And so you take those two things and you work to align them and be really strategic, and build out youth apprenticeship as a part of those work-based learning opportunities that might already be happening. Work-based learning, like the little things that I talked about earlier like job shadowing or having guest speakers, those are also the beginnings of a youth apprenticeship. When you can get an employer to come in and get to know students, or you can bring students to their work site and they get to see how excited these young people are to learn about their company, to learn about the occupations that they offer, that can spark an interest to go deeper and to build on what they're already doing.

Julian Alssid: You paint a wonderful picture of collaboration, and as we always say, workforce development's a multidisciplinary undertaking, and clearly this is a great example. Given that our podcast is Work Forces, we always ask our guests: what would you recommend to educators, employers, policymakers who want to become forces in expanding access to high-quality youth apprenticeship? Very specifically, how do they get involved? If they really want to drive this forward in their community, whichever seat or role they're in, how do you recommend doing that?

Alexandra Simon: Well, from a practical level, I would recommend that they start by understanding the landscape in their own community. I think that youth apprenticeship is really regional and locally driven, as all apprenticeships are. Youth apprenticeship is a special opportunity, and so there is a lot of knowledge building. I would really recommend folks who are already starting to do this work or interested in doing the work that they learn more about PAYA and potentially, if they're looking to start a youth apprenticeship, they join the PAYA network.

It's not something that we keep open on a rolling basis typically, but we will be accepting applications towards the end of the year. And when you join our network—and this is free, there's no cost to it—it allows you to have access to learning opportunities. For example, we just held a healthcare-specific meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, at Trident Technical College, to learn all about healthcare youth apprenticeships. We also have the National Youth Apprenticeship Summit that happens every year in the fall; this year it's November 17th through 19th in Denver, Colorado, co-led with one of our partners, CareerWise.

So I would say going to something like that, getting tuned into our webinars that we offer through the PAYA network or through PAYA more broadly, that's a really great way. I think once you understand how youth apprenticeship works, you can dig a little bit deeper. I think the other thing is to really understand that these opportunities do need support. So policymakers can become cheerleaders; we see a lot of policymakers in the U.S. at the state level really pushing to expand youth apprenticeship, creating opportunities in states like Delaware, Maryland, and Florida, knowing that you can build a robust youth apprenticeship system within your state. It doesn't always have to be at the federal level.

So I think that's another thing. But definitely tune into the PAYA network. And another way that you can learn more about these opportunities is to check in your local community and see who is doing the career technical education work. Like a very personal example, I'm applying to be on a committee for career technical education at my local school district because I want to better understand that. So if you're in the workforce development space already, get involved and understand how you can learn to grow these things.

If you're an employer, see what else is out there and if you can learn from individuals already doing this work. And I think that we're going to see more of a push for sector-specific collaboration and growth and that there's going to be a lot of opportunities forthcoming.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, thank you so much for providing all of those resources and materials. And as we close out our conversation today, I would also love to invite you to share how listeners can continue to learn more about you and your work and follow what you're doing on a regular basis.

Alexandra Simon: Great. Well, thank you so much for having me. If you want to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn, Alexandra Simon. And I do share the work that I'm doing at New America, and I'll probably also be sharing the work that I'm doing in my community as well. But also subscribe to our newsletters at New America. So if you go to newamerica.org/subscribe, you can select subscribing to "Education & Work" and PAYA newsletters, and that's where you're going to hear a lot of the latest information on this work. And you can also follow us on LinkedIn at the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA) and New America Education Policy Program as well.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much, Alexandra. Really, this is chock-full of amazing information that everyone should act on. So appreciate your taking the time to speak with us today, and we look forward to continuing to follow your work.

Alexandra Simon: Great. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I love talking about youth apprenticeship and I hope that if listeners want to learn more about youth apprenticeship, that you do reach out.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thanks again for joining us.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Workforce Consulting, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Haley Glover, Senior Director of UpSkill America at the Aspen Institute, discusses how businesses can effectively upskill their workforce in an AI-driven economy. Drawing on her experience at Lumina Foundation, Amazon, and the Aspen Institute, Glover explains how upskilling has shifted from talent acquisition crisis management to strategic workforce planning focused on validated skills. She details findings from The Upskilling Playbook, emphasizing that successful AI adoption requires thoughtful, worker-focused training aligned with business strategy—not just technology purchases driven by peer pressure. The conversation also explores the All Learning Counts initiative, which advocates for recognizing skills regardless of where they were acquired, and new research on internship programs showing how companies find value through talent pipeline development, retention, and innovation from fresh thinking. Glover addresses distinct challenges facing small versus large employers and offers practical guidance for learners, educators, advocates, and employers to build resilient upskilling programs that withstand economic shocks.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforce consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country.

Julian Alssid: We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: As we continue our summer break before returning with a new season later in August, we're revisiting our conversation with Haley Glover of UpSkill America. With AI reshaping jobs faster than most organizations can respond, and so much in flux around how we fund and support workforce development, this conversation feels more relevant than ever. Haley discusses how businesses can effectively upskill their workforce in an ever-changing, AI-driven economy, while recognizing this is an ongoing and unfolding conversation. We hope you enjoy it. Here's our episode with Haley Glover.

Julian Alssid: Kaitlin, so much of the conversation around the future of work focuses on the what—what skills are needed, what jobs are disappearing. But the harder question, and the one that really determines success, is the how. How do businesses actually help their existing employees develop the skills they need to succeed in a changing economy?

Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely. While we know the need for and importance of upskilling initiatives, actually building an effective system that helps workers grow and advance is a really complex undertaking for employers.

Julian Alssid: Right. It's one thing to agree that upskilling is necessary; it's another to have a playbook that works for both the employee and the bottom line. To create that playbook, we need guidance from leaders who understand both the policy landscape and the operational reality of business.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Exactly. We need that along with insight into researched best practices across industries. And luckily, today we're joined by someone who brings that multi-sector perspective to the table. Today we're speaking with Haley Glover, Senior Director of UpSkill America, a national initiative of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program. UpSkill America drives research and efforts that promote employer-led education and training to help workers advance and help businesses compete.

Julian Alssid: Prior to this role, Haley was Senior Program Manager at Amazon, where she led college programming for the company's Career Choice team. And before that, she served as a Strategy Director at Lumina Foundation—which is where we first met Haley—leading efforts to reduce racial disparities in credential attainment. Haley holds a bachelor's degree from Franklin College, a Master of Liberal Arts from St. John's College Graduate Institute, and an MPA from Syracuse University. Haley, welcome to Work Forces, we're thrilled to have you with us.

Haley Glover: Thanks, guys. Good morning.

Julian Alssid: Please tell us, in your own words, about your background and what led you to your role at Aspen Institute.

Haley Glover: In the spirit of time, I will give you the short journey instead of the meandering one. But fun story: you mentioned I was at Lumina Foundation, and I was there for a very long time—about 11 and a half, 12 years. I not only led the work in my last four years at Lumina focusing on eliminating racial disparities and that kind of thing, I also led portfolios focused on what we called "employer mobilization," which in my glib moments I described as getting employers to do stuff. But it was really focused on understanding and motivating how employers can take their considerable resources, influence, and that unique positioning in employees' lives to mobilize toward the credential attainment mission.

Back in 2015, when UpSkill started, I actually was one of the first funders of UpSkill at Aspen and helped try to kick that off back in the day. So my time with UpSkill started right at the beginning. Obviously, the initiative changed a lot over a decade, along with the economy, the workforce, and all of the things. But that is how I found myself here about three and a half years ago. This idea, this question about how employers can not only benefit from investment in skill development but create benefits for individuals, their companies, society, and our country—that has been a throughline of work that I've been doing for quite a long time. Between my past life as an educator, working in economic development, working in nonprofits, government, and philanthropy, as well as the private sector, that's been the river running through my work: trying to blend the streams and get more people to think very critically about how we leverage all of the power we need to get people the skills they need to thrive.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for that overview and that story of how you got to where you are. I'm curious to know: how has the focus of your work through UpSkill America evolved over the last few years? You mentioned all the changes that are occurring—what do you see as the primary focus, and how do you see that shifting?

Haley Glover: That is a fantastic question. I think there's a very simple answer, which is that the economy we're in in January 2026 is not the economy we were in when I came to UpSkill back in the summer of 2022. Three and a half years ago, employers were absolutely just falling over themselves to acquire and retain talent. The question of the time was: how do I find people with the right skills? How do I keep people with the right skills? How do I get the mass that I need in order to proceed?

That is not the question now. Now, I think employers are really leaning into: what skills and competencies do I actually need to not only fill tasks and roles that I have right now, but to take me into the future? How do I not just retain talent, but retain the right talent in particular roles that are going to have strategic value for me going forward? How do I create robust pipelines that guarantee that I, as an employer, am not going to be wasting time, energy, and effort on the upfront acquisition? How do I build my workforce strategy muscles in order to understand with much more nuance and robustness this idea of what I'm going to need in the future?

So, it's pivoted from a "fire on my front line right now" focus three or four years ago to a need to think much more critically about what's down the road and into the future. That's been huge.

From the work that UpSkill is doing, we've leaned more heavily into this idea of getting much more specific and intentional. With the addition of AI—which is both a positive in that it can help people do things with less time, energy, and effort, but also a complicator—you've got this skills validation issue. I just read a piece the other day about a $600 billion resume fraud issue, which is really asking the question about skills validation. We are trying to make sure that (1) we get people to understand and be recognized for the things that they know and are able to do, regardless of where they acquired them.

We've been calling this movement "All Learning Counts" for a very long time. It is this idea that it shouldn't matter whether you attended the most prestigious elite institution or you gained your skills through work. If you've got the same skills, you should be competing in the same way. What we do right now is we conflate a lot of different things with being "better" at something instead of really understanding what people can really bring to the table. So this idea of skills validation has become a much more important part of our work because it addresses both sides of the coin: employers need validated skills, and people need to understand their own skill set.

A lot of people will go through education programs, training programs, and work experiences and not develop what we call this metacognition of what they know. Knowing what you know and knowing what you're able to do can be a very powerful, empowering scenario for an individual. It can also be the thing that sets you apart in an interview or a process because you can say, "I know what I know, and here's how I know it, and here's what I did to show it." We're also trying to really help the employer get specific about what skills they need and how to find them through this validated skills movement. So, we're much deeper into technology than I think we ever thought we would be, or that I ever wanted to be, frankly, because it is not my primary language. But it is the method that I think will ultimately produce the right kind of results for both people and the employers they work for.

Julian Alssid: So Haley, I mentioned earlier in your intro that we need that playbook—how do you do it? You have produced a playbook: The Upskilling Playbook: AI Skill Development in the Workforce. Tell us about it. What are your findings? What have you learned, and what's in that playbook?

Haley Glover: Yeah. Well, so the playbook is not just that AI chapter, which was our latest addition, but essentially pulling together all of the things we've been learning, doing, hearing, and writing about for many years now. The idea is that companies are not necessarily encouraged or inclined to share the things that they're doing. In fact, a lot of companies will fight against that sharing because it's "secret sauce"—the thing that we do that creates our own special business value. So when we have the opportunity to share broadly—like "here's what's worked at one company," or "here are results from another company," or "here's a process that appears to work across multiple companies"—that's our bread-and-butter activity. We can shine lights on things and make these secretive or specialized processes much more visible for other people.

That's a really positive thing. That's what the playbook is about. The AI Skill Development in the Workforce chapter was a call that we decided to put out within the last couple of months here. It was less about "here's how companies should approach AI." I don't know how companies should approach AI. That is very much a "them" decision—what vendors they use, how they embed it, all of those things. That is a them decision.

What we've been observing, though—and you can see this if you read stuff and pay attention—is that a lot of companies are doing a sort of "silver bullet" kind of approach to their AI work. They're saying, "Oh, if I just give this self-directed module and training on AI to all my people, it'll solve my problems." That's, of course, not true. "If I just buy a tool, it'll all work." Also not true. "If I feel like I must invest as an employer in this thing..." Peer pressure never solved really anything.

So, what we are calling for and what we really are observing in this moment is that AI—when it is accompanied by thoughtful, humane, and worker-focused training and opportunities—that works. Product acquisition, when it is solving a business problem and serving a discrete business purpose, that works. Don't just hop on board. And leadership and workforce planning that is really thinking about AI in service of future goals, in service of those broader strategies, that works too.

None of the findings surprised me because we are always going to take a sort of human-first lens on all of our work. But what I hope we are starting to contribute is this idea that any product, technology, or process absent workforce strategy and workforce planning won't work as well as it could. You have to do the work of understanding what your workforce needs, who your workforce is, and how to best support them to be able to do the things that you want and need. And then to know with great precision, as much as possible—two years out, four years out, whatever—what they're going to need to do and how they're going to be doing it. It's when those things interconnect, powered by AI, that something magical can happen.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Haley, it strikes me that I think one of the complicated things about this moment is that AI tools are emerging constantly, right? And there's this historic concept that strategy can take a while, and yet we're moving at this very fast pace. In your research and the conversations you've been having, how are people balancing that reality? When do you say, "You know what, we're going to commit to these tools for a little while because we feel they meet these business goals and this broader strategy," and when do you say, "You know what, let's try this instead"? It seems like a very tricky balancing act right now.

Haley Glover: I think that's going to be a different question for every company and every industry, because it's a question of tolerance. What is your tolerance for risk, for experimentation, for all of those "what-ifs"? And then, what is your strategy for evaluation? What do you care about?

It does sort of speak to some of the things that we wrote about in the piece where, you know, if your evaluation strategy is, "Well, I had X number of sign-ons," or "X modules completed," or "this many instances purchased," what does that tell you? And if that is the only thing you're really looking at, you're probably not going to be in a position to really effectively understand if it worked or if it changed anything. What you might see are downstream effects like morale is bad, or managers are getting way overloaded with things that are coming from both sides, or you don't have enough information to really effectively evaluate your contract renewal. There's a thousand things that can happen on the other side of "piloting" if you don't really understand why you're doing it.

So, I'm not suggesting that companies are just willy-nilly running in and just buying stuff. And yet, I think what we do observe is that workforce strategy is the muscle that companies need to exercise that can make these things work better. Because like I said, if you do know why you're doing it, what you want out of it, and how you're going to measure the outcome you really want to see within your workforce and within your organization, then you can really understand how it's all coming together. So, that might be a bit of a lame answer, but I think it is the truth. We see a lot of experimentation with technology without necessarily complementary thought around the other side of it.

Julian Alssid: To complicate it further, Haley, you look at companies large and small in your work, don't you? So, can you speak a little bit—because that too brings a whole other world of issues—to how we compare Fortune 500s to more typically sized medium and smaller businesses? Can you speak to tech as it relates to the smaller ones?

Haley Glover: The tech question is really very similar to other questions about evaluation and implementation of new processes and tools by industry size. Everything that we've found suggests that the things that we say "work" for large companies are sort of not relevant in many ways to small organizations for a lot of reasons. These will be obvious to you: if you've got an HR team that is HR and compliance and workforce and technology and also operating, that's too many hats for one human to wear and an environment in which decisions are made differently than when you've got a team working on each of those things.

There's a capacity question, which is the biggest "duh" of them all: when somebody's wearing five hats, how in the world do they do another thing that can require a huge amount of compliance? This comes up a lot in apprenticeship: "Well, why if apprenticeship is such a great model, why doesn't it work for some people?" And that's because it requires a lot of work to really get the benefits of those programs.

There's a cost thing: if your margins are low, you do not have extra resources to spend on doing the experimental and piloting work. You need ready-made solutions that are affordable or no-cost, and often you need support from organizations that are going to be wrapping around you and working with you—workforce boards, intermediaries, others. So there's multiple layers of why strategies and things that would work for very large companies just don't apply.

And I do think, too, the risks for smaller organizations are higher because of margins, capacities, and otherwise. If you invest in a program or a technology and you're a small organization, that may be somebody you can't hire next year. That may be a contract you can't bid for. That may be something you can't purchase that you need. It's those kinds of really real challenges and real barriers that prevent us from saying unilaterally "employers should do this." It's always about context, about industry size, geography, and every other factor—which makes this work very challenging but, you know, we try to be attentive to it as much as we can.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So Haley, you mentioned apprenticeships. I know you've been exploring work-based learning, internship programs, and the value of those in the workplace for employers and employees. Can you tell us some of what you've been learning as it pertains to that initiative?

Haley Glover: Yeah, absolutely. And this is really exciting. We've got a piece coming out quite soon which I'm happy to share with you when it is released, but I'll give you a little sneak peek right now. Over the summer, we sort of were grappling with this issue of "business case," "value case." This is a truth, I think, for every question we have to ask of employers: we have to couch it in what value it provides to your organization. Altruism is not the motivating factor for the private sector. I think we all know that, but it can be harder, particularly for advocates, when you're thinking about why an employer might do something.

So where we were taking a look is—we have a really great understanding. We did some ROI studies on tuition benefits back when I was at Lumina, and those are—I still use those all the time and they are used broadly in the field. We've got some interesting ROI information out of apprenticeship programs, though colleagues over at the Brookings Institution just released findings yesterday really showing that it's very, very hard to use ROI insights generally because the applications are, like I was talking about, context matters so much. So you have to really be careful about understanding those.

And then we were looking around for—we have a general understanding of why employers do internships. And we really understand that the demand for internships, based on work by NACE and others, is huge. Eight-some million students seeking internships; about half got them. And as we think about the situation we're in with impacts on entry-level talent from AI and automation and all of those other things, people have to get work experience in order to get jobs. That's at least how we work now. And internships are a great way to do that.

But how in the world do we think about growing the number of employers offering internships or growing the number of internships? So we sort of tackled this question of: where do employers find value? Why do they offer internships? What is driving them to keep these things on, especially as we enter sort of tumultuous economic times?

We interviewed about 40 employers to sort of get under the hood of their internship programs to understand why they did them, what business objective they were trying to seek. And those findings, I think, were actually quite standard. We're not surprised really by anything that we found because employers are doing internships for the reasons that we would understand: their talent pipeline is not sufficient; they're not getting what they need from typical sources. They're trying to remediate against sort of a poorly prepared workforce; they're trying to say, "You need exposure in my industry. I'll take a chance on you, but if you don't have production experience, you don't have insight into where I am, we're really going to try to focus on that with internships." Things like low retention—creating a level of "stickiness" within new hires—is a really big priority. And then creating new opportunities for people who are managers or who are emerging managers to lead.

Those are four big problems that they're looking to solve through internships. And we also looked at: what are the conditions within companies that make internships sustainable and successful? Those come down to conditions that can often be sort of hard to replicate, but you know that they're there when they are or aren't. Those are things like executive sponsorship: having an executive leader who is bought in and really on board with the program can be the difference between it thriving and being a part of the actual talent pipeline, and just dying on the vine when things get rough. Integrating across an organization: when the internship program is just this little pocket and they get dropped in, interns get dropped into departments and people are like, "What do I do with these people?", that can be a problem. So this cross-functional integration helps leaders see. Leveraging external partnerships: states are investing a lot in work-based learning and those, particularly for smaller businesses, can be ways of maximizing resources.

And really thinking then primarily about effective programming: having actual learning outcomes, actual work that interns can do, actual supervision and mentorship, actual accountability. Those are all things that, from an organization perspective, can be really powerful.

So why this idea of why do employers invest? Really articulated key business values: attraction. Employers, to almost a person, talked about how their internship programs are creating buzz on college campuses if they're recruiting; how interns from one summer go back to their campuses and say, "I had a great experience, you should apply." They love that because it is really creating a level of advertising and acquisition and outreach that they could never do on their own. They're really looking for readiness when it comes to having students or having interns start as full-time hires without the need for expanded onboarding, without a ton of time like "where is the break room?" They know already; they're ready to go. That can be a big cost saver as well.

As I said, engagement and retention—keeping people longer—is always going to be a primary mission. They also benefit from increased workload capacity because if interns are doing real work, that can really benefit the bottom line. And there's also other effects that they want to have within their communities and their industries and their regions that should not be understated.

So long story short, this piece will come out in the next several weeks and we're excited about it. But it puts a fine point on this idea that employers invest in talent in a lot of different ways, and building the business case—really understanding from all sides why, how the value gets created in the organization, how to maximize the impact of these investments—that is the thing that we're chasing. Because it's a positive thing we know for students; we want to make it just as positive for the employers that they're working with.

Julian Alssid: Haley, did this research look at companies across multiple industries and, again, size of businesses and geographies? I know that this isn't publicly released yet, but are there any nuggets you can share of insight about where you're really seeing traction or where some of the challenges are?

Haley Glover: Yeah. Well, so we did 40 employers—it is not representative, but we did seek for representation of all different sizes. So we talked to 20-to-50-people companies and 50,000-people companies. We talked to manufacturing, finance, insurance, services, tech—all of the industries. And then we tried to get a very solid geographic distribution. We had a little bit more representation from Midwestern companies because, as you know, getting in the door often requires a relationship, and that's where I'm based and where many of our partners are based.

So yeah, I mean, a couple of findings: Small businesses, as I've sort of said before, they obviously can benefit I think a little bit more from the publicly resourced models that you have out there that are either reimbursing or replacing wages. They kind of look at it as: "This is a way we're meeting our talent goals and risk is defrayed by public investment." And so they, I think, are very pro those public programs, which is great because they're actually serving a public service; students are getting work experience and they are acquiring skills as a part of their programs of study and it is really working on both sides of the equation.

Small businesses also struggle a little bit more with the administration and the overhead and the mentoring required. As a result, they often do smaller cohorts. We do understand from larger companies that cohort models can often be really successful because you're creating shared experiences, networks, groups to rely on and learn from and work together with. So there's a tradeoff there.

And I think coming back to the workforce strategy question, it's always going to be: what kind of work do you have your interns do? What I think was really cool to hear from employers across the board—large, small, every state we talked to, every industry—is they are, to a person, I think really excited about the innovation and fresh thinking that interns bring. Whether it's something like what would have taken our staff member hours to do because they don't really know the tools, it took our intern 45 minutes to do because they'd been exposed to AI or whatever tool—they did it easily. Or they saw things in a different way than our team did and really helped us get over a hurdle that it would have taken us time to do. It's those kinds of things that I think are harder to understand the business value—like yes, of course, saving time equals saving money. But it is a really important factor in a lot of our value that employers get: this innovation and fresh thinking that comes from introducing a new generation of students with different experiences and not people who are entrenched.

And positively, on the incumbent workforce side, a lot of employers talked about the "breath of fresh air" that this gives to their workers. Mentoring a new generation, sharing what you know, telling people how you do things and teaching them can sort of reinvigorate folks and get them re-engaged with their role.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So you have offered many tips, strategies, potential practices. However, I would love to give you the space—we ask this question of all of our guests—what are, if you have any other practical steps you'd like to share around how our listeners can work with employers to become forces in this complex place that is work and learning, or help learners themselves? Take the question in whatever direction you'd like.

Haley Glover: I really love the question because you said that word "complex." It's complex and it's complicated. And I don't think it's going to get less complex or complicated as we go forward. In this moment, leaning into learning as much as we can, into supporting each other, and being mindful that the decisions we make now, we are going to see the downstream effects of them in 20 years, is really, really important.

So for learners: I was on a panel here in Indy before the holidays and they were asking, "How as a student should I best position myself?" It was a technology conference. And I said, "I can't tell you anything other than work." Obviously, try to find a job that is field-aligned, that will give you the sort of exposure to the industry and role that you want to have. Absent that opportunity: work. Because there is learning and knowledge and insight to be gained in any role. Our society doesn't, I think, give adequate credit to learning gained in some roles, and I think that's a tragedy. But employers are looking for experience and work ethic and the capacity to do the job, and the best way to understand what those things look like is to do them. So, work if you can.

And for advocates and institutions, it is about supporting learners to know what they know. I think that's a big, big problem and a big solution too. We should not, in 2026, have somebody graduate with a credential and say, "Okay, now what?" or "How do I reframe these experiences that I've had in terms of skills that employers can recognize and appreciate?" Like, that stops. We've got to get past that problem of making sure that everything is as transparent as possible and that learners have evidence of the things that they know how to do and things that they know. So that's the higher education call: shift toward competency-based education as much as you can and be very, very articulate about helping students understand their own skill sets.

And the advocates: know your business case. In trying to bring employers over to our side, to doing the programming, to expanding what they're doing, you have to couch it—especially now—in ways that the employer will benefit from. And if you can't share, if you can't tell employers what you know and how they can understand how this will impact them, you're going to have a much, much harder time because the economics are just different now. So learn that.

And for employers: chances are, every single employer who would ultimately listen to this podcast is doing something. I've not encountered an employer who doesn't care deeply about the skills of their workforce. Now, some employers program more, some less, depending on all kinds of different things. But the point is: keep doing it. Make what you're doing more visible to employees and to others. Share your stories and think about how what you're doing is creating value for your organization. The thing that frightens me—back in 2020, when the pandemic hit, we'd been doing so much work to focus on the employer business case and really understanding how employers were advancing education for their incumbent workforce. And when the pandemic hit, I was like, "I think this is all going to go away." I was so worried that in the shock of that economic shock, we were going to lose programs that were investing in students and their education and pipeline and all of that. And what we saw, I think due to unique circumstances that the pandemic produced, was actually a doubling down and huge expansion of supported education.

I'm not positive that the next economic shock won't be different, but I keep thinking that if we really understand how this is contributing to the bottom line, we really understand how this is benefiting employees, employers, our communities, our nation, we create just that bulkhead against the shock. So those are I think the four levels of how I would think about what to do next: make this work bulletproof, and then we can really keep it going.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, and it's, you know, I feel like you're singing our tune and I couldn't agree more. Such words of wisdom, Haley. So, how can our listeners continue to learn more and follow your work?

Haley Glover: Sure. So, we're upskillamerica.org if you're interested in doing old-school website spelunking. We're pretty prolific when it comes to papers, so there is that. And then follow us on LinkedIn—both for UpSkill, but also I'm always happy to engage on LinkedIn with people individually, I do a lot of that too. And then, you know, don't be afraid to drop us a line. I'm always interested in learning more about what's working and our model is to partner and elevate as much as we can. And so, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Julian Alssid: Great. Well, thank you so, so much for taking the time.

Haley Glover: Awesome. It was fun, and I'm really glad, Julian, we're still friends after all of these years. It's been a while fast, yeah.

Julian Alssid: There you go.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It was great to see you today, Haley. Thank you.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Workforce Consulting, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, discusses the urgent transition from a "schooled society" focused on credentials to a true "learning society" that recognizes and supports learning across the entire lifespan. Stevens explains how the traditional three-stage model of education, work, and retirement is becoming obsolete as Americans move toward 100-year lives amid rapid technological change brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He argues that legacy school structures that are built for durability and stability cannot by themselves prepare people for ongoing adaptation, emphasizing instead that learning happens everywhere: at home, work, and play. The conversation explores how declining fertility rates mean societies must rely on older workers, requiring a fundamental reimagining of human capital investment beyond children and young adults. Stevens calls for new conversations about who is responsible for lifelong employability and offers practical guidance for parents, young people and voters alike.

Transcript

Kaitlin LeMoine: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education industry and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Happy Summer! Julian and I are taking some time to recharge before launching our next podcast season. In the meantime, we're excited to revisit two conversations from this past season that remain relevant and top of mind for us in our own work. Our first Work Forces "rewind" is our podcast conversation with Mitchell Stevens. During this conversation, Mitchell shared his work at the Stanford Center on Longevity and discussed the need for a transition from a "schooled society" focused on credentials to a "learning society" that supports learning across the entire lifespan. We hope you enjoy this discussion as much as we did, and we'll be back with new episodes soon!

Welcome back. You know, Julian, we spend a lot of time on this show talking about the future of work, but there is a massive variable in that equation that we don't discuss enough, the reality that we are all likely to live much longer lives and need to learn continuously along the way.

Julian Alssid: It's so true. Kaitlin, we're moving toward what researchers call the 100 year life. The old three stage model where you learn in your 20s, work for 40 years, and then retire is rapidly becoming obsolete. We can't rely on a one and done dose of education, and need to fundamentally rethink how we access and engage in learning experiences across our lives.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Exactly. We need to move from what our guest today calls a school society focused on credentials and early life education to a true learning society where learning is ongoing and achieved through many contexts over one's life. Our guest is leading the initiative to define what that society can look like, mapping out a future where learning work and leisure intersect throughout the entire lifespan.

Julian Alssid: Our guest today is Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University. He convenes the Pathways Network and studies history, finance and politics of post secondary education in the United States and worldwide. Mitchell is the author of award winning studies on home education and selective admissions, and his most recent books are Remaking College: the Changing Ecology of Higher Education and Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in the Global Era.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Mitchell is also co director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, where he convenes the Learning Society initiative. This effort brings together leaders from various sectors to imagine a learning ecosystem that supports all of us across longer and multifaceted life. He's written scholarly articles for variety of academic journals and editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. We are so thrilled to have you join us today. Mitchell, welcome to the workforces podcast.

Mitchell Stevens: Thank you for having me.

Julian Alssid: Yes Mitchell, welcome, and we've talked a little bit about your background, but we'd like to have you tell us about your background and what led you to co directing the Center on Longevity.

Mitchell Stevens: I would say one of the formative experiences for me, intellectually, as is often the case for academics, was their doctoral work back in the 90s, I studied the home education movement and drove my multi-used car all over the Chicagoland suburbs to talk with men and women who were making, at the time, a very radical decision to remove their children from school and teach them at home. One of the big lessons that home schoolers taught me and now many others, is that the rhythms of conventional schooling that so many of us take for granted are highly demanding and often fairly rigid structures. They are not very flexible for the needs of particular people or even the rhythms of complicated lives. That's really what planted the seeds for what we're currently calling the limitations of a schooled society, one in which not only education and learning, but many social rewards, good jobs, social status, looks of approval from parents and grandparents, is really tied to educational credentials, and especially in the face of very dramatic and rapid changes in the character of work and technological change coming to question whether legacy school structures themselves are the best way to prepare people for ever more complicated futures.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So there are many places to jump into based on that explanation. We appreciate, we appreciate you kind of giving a sense of what has led you to this work. I guess one place I'd love to take the conversation to start is we recognize, within the last year, your work on the Learning Society within the Center on Longevity has really taken off. We'd love to hear more about the goals of that initiative and what you've sought to accomplish this year, and where you're where you see it headed.

Mitchell Stevens: How we get from home schooling to longevity, I guess, is the second half of that question that I elided the first time around. I came into the Stanford Center on Longevity, just as a professor at Stanford around 2017. Someone encouraged me to go because their assemblies were so good. I was in my mid 50s. I'd been at Stanford for just a couple of years, and I was, frankly, kind of blown away by the intellectual breadth of the conversations of that organization. First of all, we call it the Center on Longevity, not the Center on Aging, right? Aging is a frowny face, right? As in anti-aging and preventing aging and denying aging. Longevity is a strong net positive. It's a gift that the 20th century gave all of us. In fact, Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, likes to point out that lifespan grew in the 20th century more than it ever had in the entire previous centuries of human history combined. Very large change, say, additional 30 years of life over that decade, and it's happened very quickly. Societies and cultures have not had time to adapt to this gift. What have most societies done? In fact, all societies on earth at present, we parked those additional years in old age. Old age is the most expensive and arguably least fun part of the life course. It's when our bodies are most frail and when our minds are most fragile as well. So the goal of the Center on Longevity, and in fact, a global longevity movement, is to make functional adulthood as long as possible, keep old age short, but extend functional adulthood so that our minds and bodies can enjoy life and contribute to the well being of others for long, as long as we possibly can. And let's say also this is not the Silicon Valley live forever longevity. That's not really the game that the Center on Longevity is playing. We are trying to think about longevity as a civic gift that all of us should be able to enjoy, and in fact, that we need to be able to take advantage of, because also of declining fertility. Around the world, except for Sub Saharan Africa, are experiencing net declines in fertility. So that means that the men and women we're going to need to rely on for economic prosperity and civic health, are going to be older. They're going to be more mature, and so we need to sort of rethink pretty much all of our institutions in order to enable those older men and women to make the best contributions they can to their own lives, to their families, and to their societies. Another tie to the homeschooling movement, however, is that the longevity movement has developed a bunch of terms heuristics to make sense of transitions that we used to think were the sole purview of childhood. One of my colleagues refers to, for example, there's adolescence, but Barbara Waxman calls it middlessence. Middlessence is the transitions that adults make between different life stages. Michael Clinton argues that we don't retire, we should instead rewire, right, so the idea that longer lives require but also allow us to change our lives in fairly fundamental and substantial ways, to have multiple chapters in life that look and feel different from each other. So again, these are the sorts of conceptual tools that once you start to use them, it's really hard to it's hard to move backwards.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and it's interesting to think about that framing of how to rewire and think differently about these different stages, but without the formal structure of schooling, or without the formal like now I'm going from K 12 to higher ed, right? Like these, these formal moments in one's trajectory. I feel like it's a whole other experience to say, how do we rewire without those formal structures, and what does it look like to structure it for oneself?

Mitchell Stevens: That's an excellent point. Kaitlin, I mean, one way to think about the American high school, you know, grades nine through 12, is it's an elaborate machine for enabling the transition from childhood to adulthood. And for relatively more privileged families, the four year college degree is another machine for transitioning from childhood to adulthood. One of the things that's happened with the fact of lengthening lifespans is we've made adolescence one ever longer, right? So demographers talk about a domain called emerging adulthood. There's a lot of cultural ambivalence about what it means to adult as a verb, right? And. I would argue, appropriately, an increasing questioning of, have we scaffolded the transition from childhood to adulthood in the right way? We have high school, then college, and now, sort of an increasing conversation about what the early 20s are like, for example. So while you're correct that, historically, we have created organizational machinery for managing those earlier transitions. It's not necessarily the case that I would want to, you know, mimic that infrastructure for late life, but it's also the case that, as you said, that we don't really have clear rituals for navigating these different transitions. Imagine how, I mean, think of how much psychotherapy is bought and sold. How many support groups and self help books are promulgated because people are looking for mechanisms to make sense of the kinds of transitions that we're talking about.

Julian Alssid: Well, and so we're really, you know, we talk a lot about, and have for years and built a lot of our work around the notion of continuous learning and lifelong learning and and I'm really interested in speaking of terms, in examining the term you use learning society. And you know, how do you define it? What are the factors that are at play when we think about how we all learn?

Mitchell Stevens: Yeah, so the Learning Society project grew out of a year long conversation at the intersection of the fact of lengthening lifespans and the revolutionary changes that AI and related technologies are bringing. There's an extraordinarily large conversation in the United States and globally now about how to prepare people for economic viability and flourishing in the wake of rapid technological change and questions about the extent to which legacy school models are the best way to do that. Very rarely does that conversation get leavened with questions about longevity in the life course. So we talk about the need for adaptability and resilience at work, but we don't talk about the fact that the adaptability and resilience at work that we're going to need from people is going to come from people in their 40s and 60s and 70s. We talk, for example, about how current versions of large language models are good at instrumental tasks but not good at wisdom. We talk almost never about the kinds of men and women in which wisdom is found, right? Wisdom typically resides in older workers, right, whereas flexibility is thought to reside in younger workers. So, you know, putting AI in the future of work discussions alongside the facts of longevity and declining fertility, we think, you know, the men and women, the scores of men and women who have been working with me on this issue, we think that that makes both conversations richer and more substantive. So that dialog is what produced the idea that Julian just mentioned, which was sort of a an overly simplistic, but nevertheless useful heuristic in which we contrast how Americans invested in human beings in the 20th century with how they might invest in human beings in the 21st. In the 20th century, Americans responded to two waves of massive technological change by building schools now during The second industrial revolution, which took place between the Civil War and World War I, Americans created universal mass schooling for children to enable the basic skills of literacy and numeracy that an increasingly industrialized society required in the so called Third Industrial Revolution, the transformations brought about by the semiconductor and the Internet, we massively expanded higher education. We created what the Clinton and Obama administrations called the knowledge economy, and we strongly advocated for post secondary education, aka college for as many people as possible. Those were very substantial investments, and they yielded very strong positive returns, economically, civically. Now we're in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schools will not save us this time. It's not the case that we can grow schools or fix schools in ways that will enable the kinds of flexibility and ongoing development that the 21st Century requires, why not? Schools are built for durability and stability. They're built to not change. That's why social scientists talk about chronic reform in education. You notice that we're constantly reforming school? Right? We're constantly fixing something that is presumed to be broken, that's in some ways because of the bureaucratic character of schools themselves. They're set up to be stable, right? And, again, those structures were very good for human capital development in the 20th century. By themselves, they are not going to be adequate vehicles for investing in human capital. Will they be essential civic assets? Yes, right, in some ways, we must organize the first decades of the life course around something like schools, because we oblige adults, we oblige mothers and fathers to go to work all day, right? So we're not going to live without school, right? But nor can we presume that schools, in their current form and by themselves are going to enable the kind of, you know, iterative development that the future needs. So in the past, for example, we, you know, extended what counted as good enough education first from from grade eight to grade 12 to grade 16. Well, do we add another six years to get people ready for the fourth industrial revolution? I don't think so, right? So one of the big goals of the learning society is to just remind people of things that they already know, which is that schools themselves are limiting organizational structures, and we're going to have to think in new ways. Hence, a move from schooling, which happens in bureaucratically organized structures called schools, leading to things called degrees, to something called learning, which happens everywhere, at home, at work, at school, at play, at worship, and that we need to think about ways in which we can fund, scaffold, incentivize, and reward learning wherever and whenever in the life course it transpires.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And as you say that Mitchell, it also makes me think about building these skills fairly early on for learners to recognize when that learning is happening and be able to talk about it, call it out, reflect upon it, have it connect or build across either like you're saying formal learning environments or informal environment that we wouldn't call learning or school, but where that same, you know, a certain type of skill or body of knowledge is being explored and developed. It's and you know, it don't require like, it requires that explicit instruction to say, like, how do we build that awareness? How do we build for learners, the ability to say, okay, learning isn't only happening in this one structure called school, but everywhere.

Mitchell Stevens: Well, one of the, I find, intellectually satisfying and refreshing parts of this dialog is that Americans have been in conversation about what the essential purposes and content of education should be for a very long time. So say, for example, that we presume that some degree of numeracy and literacy are essential components for economic well being and civic participation. Well, how much literacy and how much numeracy. Right question one. Two are literacy and numeracy enough? Answer, no, but then, but then? What else, right? So these are questions that the architects of early education thought a great deal about these are questions that have been wrestled with by Jean Jacques, Rousseau, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, John Holt, Ivan Illich, right. Is schooling for skills? Yes, is schooling for inculcating a certain kind of character or disposition toward knowledge? Yes. ]How much of one versus the other? We're never quite sure, right? And so what I like about that is that it reminds us that these questions about, you know, what it means to be an adequately educated human being is sort of constantly in flux, right? So that we should embrace this question for our time, you know, rather than see it as a sort of new obligation that has come to us by virtue of artificial intelligence, right? We've been here before, and we're going to be an ongoing dialog about it, even as the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds. What is also very satisfying I find about this conversation in the United States is that education and learning is a widely shared cultural value in American life. I always challenge my students. Can you think of any problem in contemporary American life that people do not think schooling or education can help mitigate or improve? And that is true across a broad political spectrum. Americans may disagree on who's responsible for providing education. Whether, for example, the relative role of quote, government, unquote, versus, say, families or communities. But you'll be hard pressed to find a political or cultural constituency in the United States that does not think that more education and learning is generally a good thing. So we have a lot of faith in education and learning, and we actually have a lot of faith in schools, as long as those who are participating in them have some, you know, sense of involvement and participation. So one of the things we're trying to do with Learning Society is sort of take that positive, positive feeling that Americans have toward education and learning and directing it towards sort of new forms of learning provision that make more sense for our time.

Julian Alssid: So now this topic is front and center like never before, and recognizing that, I think there is a greater and greater recognition that learning is truly this lifelong pursuit, you know, however you think the you know, whatever you think, is the right mix and who should be doing it and where it should be happening. How can we think about or rethink our learning trajectory across life stages, you know, and as especially as technology becomes you know, and technology, unlike technology we have seen before with AI becomes a more significant role in learning and work and the rest of our lives.

Mitchell Stevens: Julian, I'm really glad you said that. You said these issues are front and center. I would say they are front and center in new ways, right? So in the middle of the 20th century, the 1950s and 1960s they were front and center in terms of who goes to school with whom. The question was the organizational contexts within which children of different backgrounds were coming together or not specifically along racial lines. That animated a great many national discussions. In the 80s and 90s. It was preparing for the knowledge economy, and that was in the era, although actually all the way through the early 2000s the second Obama administration and College for All was the mantra of the moment. I don't see those conversations as being sort of any less central now. But the content is different, right? The content is not is get everyone to college. It's how do we adequately prepare people for ongoing technological tumult. Right now, the strong positive on that, in my view, is we have put brackets around school as the human capital strategy to pursue. Right what's so nice about the idea of learning as opposed to schooling, is that we can recognize that learning happens all over the place, right? I can learn a lot without having much schooling. I can have a lot of schooling and not have learned very much, right? And I think there's a growing, I think healthy recognition that Americans have tied a great deal of social rewards to school credentials, and have discounted learning that happens in other ways and in other contexts, right? So I see this moment of yes anxiety, great anxiety about about how you know, technology will disrupt our lives, but also at least the opportunity for a great deal of optimism moving forward. Are there ways in which we could recognize and honor learning happening in a wide variety of contexts in ways that we haven't acknowledged before?

Kaitlin LeMoine: So we've spent a lot of this conversation talking about the role of school, and I'm wondering, as we think about adults and adults who are perhaps, you know, many years removed from education, as you're you know, as you're approaching this work, how are you thinking about adults and how we reframe our own learning trajectories or our own approaches? Right?

Mitchell Stevens: Some of the great challenges of this moment, I would say. One is that I've said Americans have put a great deal of faith and value in education and learning. We also have a great deal of faith in investing in children, right? Doing things on behalf of children is something that is sort of a relatively smooth path to public and private patronage, right? You know, honoring and serving adults that were not well served by legacy schools is a very different kind of project, right? And Americans, you know, we don't have a similar sort of philanthropic commitment to adults with modest education and modest earnings, right? So the population that we're going to need to rely on and invest in more to enable economic prosperity and human flourishing forward, it's just going to be different than children and young people in whom we were mobilized to invest in the 20th century. The other thing that does keep me up at night is I do know that we get massive investments in human capital, massive investments in people in the United States in response to global conflict. War often mobilizes massive investment in people. So we certainly saw that in World War II, when the nation relied on colleges and universities to recruit, train, mobilize soldier citizens, we saw that also with the Higher Education Act of 1965 massified college education in the name of global geopolitical prominence for the United States in the wake of a threat from the Soviet Union. We are now, what, four years, you know, several years into large language models. I see a significant challenge to American primacy, economically and militarily in the global stage. You know, we're but we're still crawling under the tables right? AI is still going to come get us right. We have not developed a national narrative of positive, optimistic investment in people to match the anxiety and fear that AI has created. That troubles me a great deal, and I speak from the heart of Silicon Valley, where even some of the most vaunted experts on AI and the future of work often sound pessimistic that some, somehow, somehow, what we're supposed to do is enable human flourishing, despite artificial intelligence, despite the massive disruptions to work and the rest of life that that these technologies are going to bring, rather than framing these as empowering technologies that require comparable investment in human capacity in order for the nation and the world to flourish without national and, frankly, fairly urgent narrative of organized around investing in people that we're going to miss a very large opportunity to get the nation ready for The prosperity that that we could achieve if we thought of these technologies as opportunities rather than fates?

Julian Alssid: Yeah, so, so true. Mitchell, and I think it is really that uncertainty and that anxiety that is filtering down to the masses in ways we've never seen. I mean, people are really concerned about their jobs and the high cost of getting an education that may or may not lead you to a prosperous future. And I agree with you that thinking about this all in a more positive light, and how we can be enabling humanity realizing its potential, is really where we have to move with this, because there is a lot of anxiety, and that is what I've never seen before. Workforce development has never been discussed by people at a typical cocktail party.

Mitchell Stevens: Yeah, that's, that's for sure. And I actually see that as a strong net positive too, because for the last quarter of the 20th century, and again, well into our own, you know, we placed most of our eggs in the college basket, right? I mean, there were rooms you could not enter in Washington and Sacramento, if you had the temerity to say that: "well, gosh, not, maybe not everyone is well served by a possession of a four year college degree". That ideology has been bracketed, but it has not been replaced by any comparable narrative of investing in people that was nearly as compelling as the college for all project. What was great about the college for all project was that you kind of knew what the goals were. Right. The nation was going to be a better place the more people, the greater the proportion of people entered and completed four year degrees. We put that aside, I think, appropriately, because there's nothing to presume that a four year college degree is the sine qua non of being ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But we haven't replaced it by some other target of accomplishment, of human investment that would similarly mobilize and organize investment so and I see that as a real, real challenge, challenge politically, because there's no shared optimistic vision about what the nation will look like 10 years from now, if we all work in the same direction. I think that absence of a positive narrative is part of how we have arrived at the the current presidential administration, and its second chapter, it's a problem scientifically, because we don't know, say we want to enhance human learning across the life course. Well, what is, what is the goal of that? Right? How do we sort of organize research to move us in that direction? And so one of the goals of the learning society project is to try to set a table, to establish what some of those audacious and optimistic goals would be. Lifetime Learning and prosperity is great, but how do you know if you're getting there? Right? You know there's a great deal of ambiguity about that. At present, and you know, sort of to try to disambiguate that, to try and specify some goals for the United States we want, in 2035, terms of human capital is very, very much a part of the learning society's ambition.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So, building off of that last statement, Mitchell, we often ask about how our audience can become forces in these efforts. And so I'm wondering, as we wind down our discussion, what are a couple of practical steps that our audience can take in 2026 and beyond, to become forces in supporting the development of a pathway for continuous lifelong learning.

Mitchell Stevens: I think there are several things that I would encourage people at different stages in life to pursue. One is, if you are the parent or grandparent of a young person who is in high school or headed toward high school, think very carefully about what kind of conversation you might want to have with that loved one about what their transition to adulthood should and could look like, right? If there's a presumption in your family that people should go to college, where does that presumption come from? What is implicit in it? What do you think that college, you know, something called college, is supposed to provide? You know, don't take that presumption for granted if you're from a household in which you know, you know, college has not been regarded as a sort of viable or approachable activity. Lean into that right. Ask questions about yourself, about what would it mean to get ready for a very rapidly changing world of work. Don't presume that there are experts who can help you do this right, because we don't have a script for this moment yet. The other is to think about again, if you're a parent or a grandparent, how many careers should you talk about your children having? Is it one? Is it three? Is it five? Right? How might you encourage those young people to think about the relationship between earning money and raising families and caring for loved ones? Because one of the cruelties of the schooled society is that we often oblige people to choose between working for pay, investing in themselves by going to school, or taking care of loved ones, right? You know. How would you encourage a young man or woman who might be anticipating having children to sort of, sort of think about the relationship between those things. If you are a young person you know, you might think about, you know, think about a world in which you get to have multiple adult lives. You get to have multiple stages. Not only are you going to grow up, but you can, you can have several chapters of adulthood, right? It's kind of fun to imagine, you know, what that might look like if you're a voter. I would encourage you to think about, you know, who is responsible for the lifelong employability of the people in your state, because the only thing that the people in your state are owed right now is a high school diploma. Is that enough? Do the people in your state deserve more investment than a high school diploma? If the answer to that question is yes, well, what are they owed? A four year college degree, a two year college degree, an education savings account, tax subsidies for tuition. I don't know what the answer is, right, but that question about who's responsible for Americans sort of meeting the challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is really an open question, and I think we should be asking the people who we want to represent us that question. I don't know what the answer is. It's not my place to have the answer, but I think raising the question about responsibility for human flourishing in the fourth industrial revolution is something that we should have conversations about constantly.

Julian Alssid: Well, you're certainly raising the right questions. Mitchell, and we thank you so much for taking the time today. We will definitely follow you on learningsociety.io, and look to see more and more of these questions surfaced and unpacked and answered for all.

Mitchell Stevens: My pleasure, honor to be here.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for taking the time. Mitchell, we hope you enjoyed today's conversation, and appreciate you tuning in to workforces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces dot info forward slash podcast. You can also find workforces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your colleagues and friends, and if you're interested in learning more about workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.

Clare Bertrand, Executive Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at College Board, discusses how one of education's most recognized organizations is expanding its mission beyond college admissions to embrace career-connected learning as a core priority. Clare shares the story behind AP Career Kickstart, a new suite of courses co-designed with IBM, CompTIA, and Cisco that allows students to earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials before graduation, with the first two courses, AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity, launching nationally in fall 2026. The conversation explores how deep partnerships with chambers of commerce across 41 states have shaped the design of these courses, why employers are hungry for a trusted, nationally recognized signal of durable skills, and how College Board is thinking about scale in a way that honors local labor market context. Clare also reflects on the acquisition of Teamship, the role of intermediaries in connecting employers to schools, and what it will take for educators, employers, and policymakers to become true forces in expanding access to career-connected learning for all students.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping 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: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces Podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

As we close out the academic year and take some time to reflect on the past year of our work at Work Forces, we're struck by a theme that keeps showing up across our work: the integration of academic and career preparation across learning experiences, from K-12 through higher education.

Julian Alssid: That's right. Listeners may remember our recent conversation with Dan Gonzalez when his company, District C, was building project-based learning experiences that put students to work on real business problems. Since then, District C became part of College Board, an organization most of us associate with the SAT and Advanced Placement exams. That shift is part of a broader initiative asking what it means to prepare a student for both college and career, not as two separate tracks, but as one continuous throughline.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to our guest today. Clare Bertrand, Executive Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at College Board, leads the chamber, intermediary, and philanthropic partnerships behind the development of AP Career Kickstart, a new suite of courses co-designed with IBM, CompTIA, and Cisco that lets students earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials before graduation. Before joining College Board, Clare was a senior leader at Jobs for the Future, where she helped build one of the field's first career navigation tech products. She also co-founded a neurodiversity intermediary focused on building more inclusive talent pipelines for higher-performing companies. Clare, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us on the podcast today.

Clare Bertrand: Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. And I love starting a conversation that references Dan Gonzalez and Teamship. Dan's one of my favorite people at College Board, and I'm so thrilled for Teamship to be part of our portfolio. So thank you for that. I'm just very excited to get into it.

Julian Alssid: It was great to interview Dan, and the flow is obvious and will become more so as we have this conversation. So to kick us off, tell us in your own words about your background and the path that led you to your current role at College Board.

Clare Bertrand: So as you mentioned, I was a senior leader at JFF before joining College Board. There I directed federal initiatives and innovation partnerships, and I launched a career and technical navigation product that was used by Job Corps and really focused on young people who were overage and undercredited in high school — what they used to call opportunity youth, but really students who are disconnected from education and the workforce. That role gave me a 360-degree view of the systems and actors that inform how students get to and through school and into the workplace as young adults. And as mentioned, I did co-found a talent intermediary focused on helping companies hire and retain neurodiverse individuals, working mainly with the cybersecurity industry. That experience helped me understand the gap between employer and worker expectations, which was very real in that work.

When I came to College Board, I authored our career and partnership strategy to position College Board and its programs within the broader education and workforce ecosystem, to really help expand our reach to more students and ensure that we clear a path for students to thrive in whatever they choose to do after high school. So now I lead partnerships, and that really focuses on the launch of our AP Career Kickstart courses, which you all mentioned and we'll get into a little later. I'm in regular conversation with chambers of commerce, companies, schools, national and local intermediaries, and philanthropic partners. College Board is in new rooms and new conversations, and it's a really exciting time. And finally, I'll mention that my husband has been teaching in the classroom for 25 years, so that keeps me very grounded in the everyday world of teaching and learning.

Kaitlin LeMoine: College Board has long been associated with traditional college prep and AP courses. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the decision to expand into career-connected learning with AP Career Kickstart as a core offering, and what's driving that.

Clare Bertrand: It's very true — college is in our name. We've been working to help students get into college for over a hundred years. And to be clear, college is still the right choice for many students, but it isn't the path for all students. Given that we're a mission-driven nonprofit, we know that we can do better to reach more kids. Our CEO thinks of our mission in three ways: we want to help students feel that their work is relevant, especially the work they're doing in high school; expand our programs to reach more students; and ensure that all students are ready for the future of their choice — whether that's a four-year college, a two-year college, apprenticeship, or going straight to work. We really want them to be prepared for that.

AP Career Kickstart lives at the center of all three. Advanced Placement, which has been around for seventy years, is a college-level course that confers college credit, and we save students about three billion dollars in tuition every year. I love that statistic. Our new AP Career Kickstart courses are built with AP's thoughtful design process — they're built with faculty and industry at the table, which is quite new for us, and are connected to in-demand occupations. Our first two courses launching this fall are AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity. We want students to have more choice, and we want to give employers stronger signals of readiness — the same thing we do for universities and colleges, but now at scale for career. So we're tackling both a skills gap issue and a validation gap. Students who have these skills sometimes can't articulate them, and employers aren't sure what signal to trust outside of degrees and certifications. College Board, we feel, is uniquely positioned to help fix this. We're already thinking of ourselves as a trusted validator of career readiness, and we believe we can provide the same signal for career that we've long provided for college readiness.

Employers and industry are at the table, and the goal here is simple: at the end of the day, we want to end the artificial divide between students who are going to college and students who are going into careers. Students deserve both, and they're ready for both. A lot of our students work while they're in school, and students want to figure out what's right for them rather than be put on a very narrow path.

Julian Alssid: Clare, you've spent a lot of time meeting with chambers of commerce across the country to help design AP Career Kickstart. What have you been hearing from them and their employer members, and how has that shaped what you're building?

Clare Bertrand: You say "chambers of commerce" and you may have seen a big smile come across my face. I never in my career thought I'd love chambers of commerce so much. Even though I've been working in the education-to-workforce ecosystem for over twenty years, I'd actually never worked with chambers before. I've had the pleasure of overseeing an initiative with the US Chamber of Commerce, which has been a great partner for College Board. The US Chamber has actually endorsed both AP Business and AP Cybersecurity. The initiative we launched together is called Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce, and we invited chambers to help us prepare AP courses and be part of the Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce Coalition. Over 70 chambers in 41 states responded to support the courses and help us raise awareness across the country.

Over the last 18 months or so I've been working with these chambers — listening to them, visiting them, presenting for them — and I've been really impressed by how embedded in their communities they are and how well they translate between education and business. They know the superintendents, they know the businesses, they know the state agencies. They're really an anchor, or what we'd call a backbone organization, across states. I've been so pleased to work with all of them and learn from them.

At the dinners with employers that the US Chamber has set up for College Board, and in speaking with state and metro chambers, one thing we've heard over and over again is that employers struggle to identify early talent. There's really no trusted, nationally recognized signal for durable skills. We did a survey with the US Chamber of 500 hiring managers, and 80 to 90% said that high school students aren't ready for the workforce. But then 90% said they'd love for students to have a business course and some signal of the skills they're building. So we're listening to that and working with employers to get them at the table to help us build not just the two courses we have now, but the courses of the future for Advanced Placement.

We have these continual conversations with employers about how they're working with education and higher education now, and how we can help them work better and bring in the early talent they know they need — with the right signals and understanding of what skills and knowledge students are coming through the door with. Through the Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce Coalition, we now have about 400 letters of support from employers, essentially saying these courses give students the right skills and this is a credential they can get behind. We've been really excited about that, and grateful to the US Chamber as well as state and metro chambers who've helped us better understand how to do this work in local contexts while also scaling it nationally.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I'd love to dive into the design of these courses a little bit. As you're saying, Clare, it sounds like they're working at this intersection of employer need and faculty input. What has been the process of building them out? How do they look and feel? How much of the learning happens out in the community versus in the classroom?

Clare Bertrand: These Advanced Placement courses are designed differently than Advanced Placement traditionally — and I say that with heavy air quotes, because we've been thinking differently about AP for a few years now, starting with AP Seminar, which looks very different from a traditional course like AP History. AP History is a great course, very rigorous, and built with faculty, looking first at data across the country: where should these courses be, what is needed in high school, and what do colleges think students need when entering college? We're applying that same design process to our AP career-connected courses.

AP Seminar, for example, includes performance tasks, not just an exam. Students work in teams, doing research on topics they're interested in. That got us thinking about relevance for students. We saw students light up, and we saw students who had never taken an AP course before go into AP Seminar and say: I can do this, I'm an AP student. We wanted to see more of that. So we thought of AP Career Kickstart as a place where more students could enter into AP and get both industry skills and academic skills.

Where we started was really looking at occupational data, which we hadn't done before — what is in demand in the labor market, and where are the gaps in what's happening in schools? For example, only about 2% of high schools have a cybersecurity course. There's plenty of computer science, which is excellent, but very few cybersecurity courses. So we built AP Career Kickstart: Cybersecurity to be responsive to what high schools need and what employers need, knowing that cybersecurity is a national security issue and there's tremendous need for talent. We designed it as a survey course to really invite students to understand cybersecurity and explore careers within it. We actually have two cybersecurity-related courses — Cybersecurity and Networking — and we've thought carefully about how students can explore careers in that space.

One thing we're trying to do is push against the myth of cybersecurity as people in hoodies alone in a dark corner. Cybersecurity professionals work in healthcare, agriculture, on submarines. Whether you want to go directly to college, directly to career, or into the military, you need some cybersecurity knowledge, and it exists in every single industry.

Similarly, with AP Business with Personal Finance, we wanted to integrate financial literacy into business because we want students to think about how they're going to make money and how they're going to manage it. We love that combination because we want students to have financial literacy, but sometimes financial literacy on its own makes a lot of assumptions about a student's situation and their family's situation. What we wanted to do was give students a business framework so they could take financial literacy and think about it in the context of building a business and thinking of themselves as a business person. That course also has case studies — we're using the Harvard Business School case study model — with 22 employer case studies, and we're inviting employers like McDonald's to submit new case studies as well. We also have competitions as part of AP Business. So there are work-based learning components, project-based learning components, and a real effort to connect students taking AP Career Kickstart to opportunities like internships and apprenticeships. We've got partnerships with CareerWise as part of that. We've been piloting a number of these courses the last couple of years, and they're launching nationally this fall in 2026.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's really exciting, and really interesting to hear how you're thinking about these fields that cut across sectors. Cybersecurity exists everywhere — it gives students a window into many different industries. And the integration of business acumen with personal finance just seems like such a natural combination and one that is incredibly needed. So exciting to hear about the direction you're taking this.

Clare Bertrand: It's been really interesting when we talk to employers. I made the assumption that employers wouldn't care much about the financial literacy component of the course, which is a really integrated part — it's almost half of the course. I thought they'd want the business survey and the business skills. But actually, employers have been almost as enthusiastic, or more enthusiastic, about the financial literacy piece and the way it's woven into the business content. That's been delightful to hear. And if you look at the data, organizations like Starbucks are actually integrating financial literacy training into their learning and development programs because employees are struggling with it — they didn't get it in school. So we're really excited about the opportunity.

Julian Alssid: As you scale this nationally, Clare — and I think you've begun to answer this — how do you maintain depth while also achieving broad reach? I know you've written about this quite thoughtfully, and I imagine meeting with chambers of all different sizes is one way you're navigating it. How are you thinking about that tension?

Clare Bertrand: I think when we consider scale — and I've been doing national work and running initiatives with funders for quite a long time — scale can sometimes be used as a blunt instrument. If we reach a lot of kids, that must mean it's working. But that isn't necessarily true. What scale really needs is insight into local context. And I'm not the only one saying this — there are fantastic funders, initiatives, and a long history of organizations doing scale right. I just think we need to talk about it more explicitly and make sure we're designing for scale while first starting with local context, ensuring we're replicating quality and rigor in a way that can be customized for that local context.

And that's where the chambers have really helped us. Every single labor market is a little different. Waco, Texas may be thinking about aviation. Des Moines has cybersecurity and a concentration of financial services headquarters. Orange County has data centers coming in. These chambers are thinking about all of those local realities. But when we think about AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity, they know that the course frameworks look the same in every single high school, and what the exam and credential signals to employers across the country is consistent. So we're thinking about how to use the way we've already scaled Advanced Placement and do that same thing for employers, for universities, and for both — making sure students have the same choices regardless of where they live.

Because College Board has teams in every single state and digs in with districts to provide services and professional development to counselors — and now we have stakeholders at chambers of commerce, among employers and industry associations — we're really thinking about the whole ecosystem. And that's going to help us with scale, because we can hand something off and trust that partners on the ground are going to deliver the course framework and the assessment in a way that's meaningful for a student in Des Moines, Iowa, Waco, Texas, or Boston, Massachusetts — and that employers can trust it. We're really excited about thinking about scale differently, and testing how we can do this with our employer and industry partners, as well as schools and higher education.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I can imagine this next phase must be very exciting, because you're going to see how this is implemented in practice across different contexts — where schools need additional support because they don't always have connections to community or business, and where employers are more or less naturally inclined to engage. It sounds like you're at a real juncture of tremendous learning.

Clare Bertrand: Totally, yes. And I think there are opportunities to continue that learning and have that conversation. Something I really like to push my colleagues on — both at College Board and across the field — is to move beyond the headlines. There's a lot of "employers aren't getting the skills they need from education." But then you talk to an employer and they have 18 different higher education partners. They are talking to higher ed, they're informing the curriculum, there's all of this work already happening. And I think if we stop at "the system's broken," we miss what's already working — and a lot is working. What College Board is trying to do is add value to that. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're trying to make sure our courses and assessments fit into what's working and really amplify and validate it. We're learning a lot, we're sharing with our partners, and we're really excited about the launch. AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity truly meet the needs of students, families, and employers in the communities they're part of. It's been very exciting.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So, Clare, you've mentioned various stakeholder groups you've engaged with throughout the development of AP Career Kickstart. For all of our guests, we love to ask how others can become forces — given that the name of the show is Work Forces. What would it take for educators, employers, or policymakers listening to this conversation to become forces in expanding access to career-connected learning, drawing on your experience building AP Career Kickstart or your many years in the field?

Clare Bertrand: First and foremost, if anyone wants to learn more about AP Career Kickstart, I'd invite them to go to collegeboard.org/AP-career-kickstart. You can share the link with your listeners. But beyond that, I think for employers and chambers — just getting in the room. We know that high school faculty and college faculty are under a lot of pressure, doing a lot of great work every single day. And while they're working hard to build the academic and durable skills that connect to careers, they need employers and chambers of commerce to step in and say, how can we be helpful? And I think that's really part of why College Board has invested in Teamship, because we want to scale the opportunity for employers to work with schools. It's been a challenge — I've talked to employers who want to work with their school district but face different MOUs for every single high school in their region. It's a lot to handle. Teamship helps smooth that connection, and it's low-hanging fruit. It doesn't require many hours of an employer's time, and it just gets them in the door.

It also gets employer staff genuinely excited, because working with teenagers is fantastic. They get to see how sophisticated, smart, sharp, and full of ideas high school students actually are. So we're really excited that we have the AP Career Kickstart model, paired with the opportunity that Teamship provides — and Teamship can actually be used at any school, whether they have AP or not. We hope most schools will have AP, but we're also thinking about how our chamber partners are setting up internships and how AP students will be more aware of those opportunities. There's a real opportunity for awareness, with College Board as a partner to all these stakeholders, helping folks connect the dots. College Board is traditionally a membership organization and a natural convener, and we're just starting to convene new stakeholders.

Generally speaking, check out AP on collegeboard.org and learn more about AP Career Kickstart in your local area or region. Look into your chamber of commerce — they may be involved in our Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce initiative. We can share a link for that as well. There are a lot of different entry points, but I'd start with the collegeboard.org website.

Julian Alssid: Where can people follow you, Clare?

Clare Bertrand: I'm on LinkedIn, and some of my writing is on the All Access blog, but LinkedIn is definitely the place to follow me.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. It's really great to hear about all of this and to learn about AP Career Kickstart, and we definitely look forward to tracking this as it unfolds. I do think you'll learn a lot, and I'll be really interested to see how a large organization like College Board keeps up with what's around the corner.

Clare Bertrand: Absolutely. It's quite dynamic. We're looking at more career-connected courses to launch, and there's a lot of dynamism in the labor market with AI — I didn't mention AI at all during this conversation, which is remarkable. But that's coming, and we want to make sure students are prepared for it. It's something we think about constantly, and this is why the last two years of building new relationships and thinking about what new tables we can set — with as many stakeholders as are invested in early talent and making sure all kids are successful — has been so important. That's really something we're looking forward to convening and nurturing as one of the biggest national players in the United States and globally.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today, Clare, and look forward to remaining in touch.

Clare Bertrand: Thank you.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about the Work Forces consulting practice, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Michael Herrera, Ed.D., Executive Director of Upper Bucks County Technical School and Vice President of Region 1 on the national board of the Association for Career and Technical Education, discusses how high-quality career and technical education connects students' interests to real economic impact. Herrera shares striking results from his school's cooperative education program, including students earning over one million dollars through paid co-op experiences and 93% of participating students receiving full-time job offers from their co-op employers after graduation. He explains how the school's relationships with more than 250 industry partners keep curriculum aligned with current and emerging fields. The conversation explores his distinctive approach to treating language as an economic asset, crediting students' bilingual abilities to open doors in healthcare, law enforcement, and manufacturing, as well as his work building employability skills alongside technical and academic instruction. Herrera makes the case that career-connected learning should be a right for every student, not the exception, and offers a vision for how educators, employers, and policymakers can work together to expand access to high-quality CTE nationwide.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

As we head into summer, we find ourselves reflecting on the school year that is winding down and anticipating the one that is right around the corner yet again. In so many of our conversations on this podcast and in our consulting work, we talk about workforce development and career readiness from the vantage points of higher education, employers, and training organizations. And today we're turning our attention to career and technical education programs in the K-12 space that are preparing young people for the world of work.

Julian Alssid: That's right, Kaitlin. And it is striking how much innovation is happening at the individual school level, often quietly and without enough recognition. CTE has certainly come a long way from the vocational education of a generation ago. And today's most effective programs are building career pathways, embedding work-based learning, and meeting students where they are to open doors to economic mobility.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And this brings us to our guest today. Michael Herrera is the executive director of Upper Bucks County Technical School in Pennsylvania and vice president of Region One on the national board of the Association for Career and Technical Education, or ACTE. He's a recognized leader in career-connected learning and has led initiatives that expand work-based learning, industry-recognized credentials, and employer-aligned pathways that open doors to economic mobility for high school students. Michael, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you here with us today.

Michael Herrera: It's a privilege and honor. Thank you so much for having me here today.

Julian Alssid: So Michael, to kick us off, please tell us about your background and your dual roles both as executive director of your CTE school and as vice president of Region One on the ACTE board.

Michael Herrera: I'd be glad to. As mentioned, proud executive director of Upper Bucks County Technical School. I also proudly serve on the ACTE Region One Board of Directors for my Association for Career and Technical Education. I become increasingly passionate about career-connected learning because I see firsthand what happens when students understand what they're learning and how it connects to their future. Our theme is from interest to impact. Whether it's an industry credential, work-based learning experience, apprenticeship, college pathway, or an employment opportunity, students become far more engaged when learning has purpose. At UBCTS, we serve 900 students across 23 career pathways, technical programs, and our focus is helping students develop the skills, experiences, and confidence needed to thrive in a rapidly changing economy.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And Michael, just a little bit more on your background, you've been at this work for some time, correct? You've been in this role for some time and leading this work for many years.

Michael Herrera: I have over two decades in career and technical education.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So drawing on your background, this experience, these many years in this space, when you think about career and technical education, what does high-quality career-connected learning look like in practice? And what role does on-the-job and work-based learning play in your model? You mentioned it in your intro here, but would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that and walk us through some examples.

Michael Herrera: Let me work backwards. Our students left—we had a senior ceremony last week.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Congratulations.

Michael Herrera: Thank you. Our students earned over one million dollars through a nationally recognized school-to-work program. That's the impact. Our students worked over 67,000 hours just during the school day. It does not include nights and weekends, as that number will far exceed that. That's the power for me for career and technical education. We had 110 industry partners that shared, and 93% of our students were offered full-time employment. So all of our students left with industry-recognized credentials and they left with a lot of pride. There should be pride in the dignity of work right now in our society. I firmly believe that career and technical education builds stronger individuals, families, and communities. And that's the power of CTE and career-connected learning. It gives people hope. I believe that this provides socioeconomic mobility. Many of our students, whether they have an IEP or come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, this opportunity gets them on an equal playing field. And it all starts with our interests. We use the term here at Upper Bucks, "ikigai"—purpose, passion. When, according to NPR, 68% of adults hate their job, that's a problem. We have a critical skills gap. So we like to really hope and instill what makes that student excited. What makes them go out, work those hours, and have that pride. And ikigai for us is what the world needs, what you love, what makes you money. When I started in Career Tech Ed years ago, we asked students, why do you go to school? And the answer was always to learn, which we are all lifelong learners, but without that purpose and that passion and that desire, that spark is not there. And what we do here at Upper Bucks in career-connected learning, we connect a student's education with the workforce.

Julian Alssid: So just as a follow up, Michael, since students are coming in and may not have a whole lot of experience and knowledge about the workforce, how do you even introduce them to the different possibilities and begin to help them find areas they'd like to explore?

Michael Herrera: We are bringing students in as early as first grade through our summer camps because our students have the experience, they have the skills and the aptitude, but may not necessarily have the interest. So exposing them to the benefits of what we offer, what the world needs, what's going to give them an opportunity to become stronger individuals and build stronger communities is just opening the doors, starting as first graders, working with our sending schools, helping them find their interests and their aptitudes is critical for us. At the same time, what we've really done was we did our best to communicate that. As you mentioned, vocational career and technical education can no longer be the best-kept secret. During COVID, when a lot of the world was shutting down, career and technical education accelerated. We are the frontline workers. We're the workers that are going to keep the economy growing. And it was at that time, in order to create a COVID safety plan, when we placed our students on our school-to-work program, we invited the parents, we invited the mentors, and we met at the businesses. That became our signing day. So what we've done is we've also put that on social media and shown the importance, no different than an athlete or any other type of signing day. And so we wanted to identify it, celebrate it, and then replicate it. We've grown since then, and now we place a banner: "We employ a UBCTS student". So when we talk about the return on investment with education and our community members are driving by over a hundred businesses that are hiring our students, they're seeing the firsthand knowledge of career and technical education. And they're seeing the partnership that we have with business and industry to help guide, build those stronger students and communities.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Michael, you mentioned in discussing the recent graduation of some of your learners, your 110 industry partners. I would love to hear a little bit more. I mean, that's a lot of industry partners. Can you talk a little bit about how you've gone about building out those partnerships and what are different models through which learners engage with those industry partners?

Michael Herrera: I think it's a partnership. We were a national finalist in the Career Z Challenge for many of those principles that I just mentioned. It's a partnership. So we have over 250 business and industry professionals that come in and help modernize our curriculum. So we're not only preparing students for the work today, but in the future, partnering with organizations like Aerium in terms of drones, aviation, and emergent industries. That's the difference in career and technical education is we're constantly adapting to meet current and future needs in the industry. We hold that relationship sacred in that there's an agreement, there's a partnership. So we work with business and industry, we tailor our curriculum to fit their needs. We do site visits once per month. We help communicate between the students and the school in our programs, ensuring success. So I really appreciate you bringing that up, Kaitlin. It's not by accident; it's with intention, it's with detail, and it's with relationships. We talked a little bit about our graduation, but one of the things that we're most proud about is at the end of the year with award ceremonies, having business and industry come in, celebrating that relationship, seeing students offered full-time jobs, apprenticeships, and scholarships. They're investing in the students and their future. And being able to share that and be a part of it is really, really meaningful to me.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, that really comes through across the airwaves. So, one of the distinctive ideas that you've put out there is the idea of treating language as an economic asset for your students. And how does that lens kind of shape the way CTE programs should be designed, and what does it look like in practice?

Michael Herrera: So I had an opportunity to visit an organization where there was a big movement with the Seal of Biliteracy. And we became involved as a career and technical school because we looked at it from a different lens. Language is an academic subject, but it's also a critical workplace skill. So our initiative using language as an economic asset, which we believe is critical to our thriving economies and national defense, we began to credential our students' ability. And about three years ago, I had an opportunity to sit on the stage at the Seal of Biliteracy summit. And I was on a stage with someone from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. And they mentioned approximately 120 languages spoken there, 20 full-time translators, and they just didn't have enough to fill that gap. So we came back to the school working with Language Testing International and ACTFL, and we began to credential our students' language ability. It started off with almost like a student find. It was really hard to identify what students had the superpower. And many of them didn't look at it as an asset. It was something that was not to the forefront. So imagine our student that's in healthcare who already has her CNA, going to get their RN, but is credentialed in one or two other areas, whether it's Spanish, Mandarin, or this year Turkish, and it was really a game changer for us. So we're very proud and we just believe that that opens doors; that's a credential that's needed.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and to value that really critical skill in a way that is, as you're saying, valuing it from the perspective of earning a credential, I feel like just further raises the impact. It's really interesting to hear you share more about that, Michael.

Michael Herrera: And that was really interesting working with organizations like Digital Promise and Global, with a lot of the manufacturing coming back, this is a superpower. We know that many businesses are losing opportunities. So whether it's in dental, whether it's law enforcement, whether it's our students that are entering the military, it's a great way to be able to highlight that. And when we talk about global initiatives, we meet students where they are. We're credentialing their languages. We're giving them opportunities to become credentialed. We're giving them opportunities to hone their crafts in our technical schools. Here's a wonderful example: we're part of the NASA Hunch program. So our students are working on building parts in space. And our instructor had the students working on a new part. He wanted to make a model of it before developing and making those parts. And one of our students, it was a female student, went back to the instructor and stated, "I'm sorry, I can't make the model. I don't have all the dimensions." Well, through a lot of emails later, through NASA, she was right. So think about that impact and think about the importance of our underclassmen working on these real-world projects with credentials; think about the innovation, the manufacturing, where we are in this country, and the power of that. So those are just the opportunities that really separate us, and where you see the power of career-connected learning.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I guess drawing on that last example, as we think about how to further expand the power of that learning, what do you see as the changes that need to happen systemically to expand access to high-quality CTE programs? And where do you see the most promising opportunities emerging either through either of your roles or both of your worlds?

Michael Herrera: I think we're at a critical age right now in education with the advent of AI, with the advent of our educational systems. Our model has been around for years and it's been developed. So I think really what we kind of take a look at is how do we expand that to all students? And I was working with Mark Perna, who's a national voice in career and technical education. And he cautioned me to say, "Michael, it's great for the role, the innovation you're doing with career and technical education, but how can we enhance that to career-connected learning to serve all students?" And that was great advice. So I think our model is we focus on employability, technical, academic—that has to be built in through all of our educational systems. There are some scary statistics with employability. And over the last two years, we've had a national gold medal winner and a bronze medal in that employability. So again, being able to be on the workplace, I believe, is an excellent social-emotional curriculum, and just being able to partner with that. But when we have and see some of the statistics, like 53% of recent grads struggle with eye contact, or the 50% with unreasonable compensation. As much as 15% of college graduates may be bringing a parent to the interview, we've got to really change the way our educational systems are working. So again: employability, technical, and academic. Our instructors are showing the value of academic integration through literacy, through math, because it's applied. And then obviously the technical skills. So we look at that. I'm a big believer in the school-to-work pipeline. 77% of college graduates felt they learned more after six months on the job than after the completion of their university degree. It's a scary statistic for me. Some statistics say 50% of students believe their college major will lead to a good job. So again, returning back to our themes: interests, impact, what the world needs, what makes you money, what makes you happy, how do we then replicate that and provide these opportunities for all students?

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and how to navigate that framework across a lifespan too, right? I think that is currently one of the things I'm thinking a lot about is just the world is moving very quickly. And as you said, I think your connections to industry can help the coursework and assignments to remain relevant and pretty applied. But how do we all as people, as lifelong learners, navigate a framework where you're regularly reevaluating interest, passion, economic mobility, and bringing that together across a lifespan?

Michael Herrera: And I think that's it. I've done a webinar with Dr. Alveda King; she's the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King. And we talked about career-connected learning being the new civil right. My dissertation in the past was content area literacy, and I still believe literacy is the key to economic prosperity, but I've expanded that recently and really believe in career-connected learning. Right now, Secretary McMahon is emphasizing workforce readiness, career pathways, work-based learning, industry-recognized credentials, and apprenticeships, like we talked about at the national level; these all align with what we believe in career and technical education, a strong alignment between not only education, but labor. When I started about 15, 20 years ago, believe it or not, apprenticeship did not count as a positive placement for students. It was all about college for all. And regardless of political affiliations, career and technical education from both sides of the political aisle, along with independents, community members are seeing the value and importance of that. One other area that I'd like to highlight is we're in a rural area. Our local EMS would have taken about 15 minutes just to get to the school, to come here. So one of the things that we've done was we built a substation for our EMS right at the school. We have 800 students. We're working with them to build EMS, fire, law enforcement, and a lot of the work that we're doing with drones. Our students are getting involved with it at the early stages. And again, that's just one example of how CTE builds stronger communities. Our students will be working alongside with them through ride-alongs. They'll come in, they work with our students. We're in hazardous industries right here; we're very fortunate, we have a strategic alignment with OSHA. But how great knowing is that we have that EMS substation right here in the front of our school partnering. And going back to the language, imagine that our students that are riding along have the ability to communicate, right, because we know that communication is critical. When you look at business and industry and what their needs are, communication is at the top of the list. So those who are able to do that in multiple languages just have that great advantage.

Julian Alssid: So Michael, our audience are the educators, the workforce practitioners, the employers, the policymakers who need to build the system that we're talking about and are trying to build the system that we're talking about. A question we like to ask of our guests is how can our audience become forces in the field, and in this case, in expanding access to high-quality career and technical education?

Michael Herrera: I would assure every learner in America has meaningful access to career-connected learning. From the interest, from being exposed to business and industries, to careers. As early as kindergarten, I think we can have some of these conversations about careers. Every student should be able to explore those careers as they go through the system, engage with employers, earn industry-recognized credentials, or skills through alternative routes, which would be familiar with your audience, participate in work-based learning, and understand the connection between education and opportunity. So career-connected learning shouldn't be the exception; it should be experienced by everyone. The future belongs to systems that connect education and workforce development. When students see that pathway, they engage. When they engage, they succeed. And when they succeed, communities, employers, and economies all benefit.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation today, Michael. As we close out today, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Michael Herrera: Right now, LinkedIn—please reach out, and I am really looking forward to continuing to learn best practices. I firmly believe when much is given, much is expected. So my role with the ACTE, being able to visit different areas and states, is incredible. So I just wanted to finish with this. I had a great opportunity to work with the UFT in New York, where they were building AI systems. Some of our partners in upstate New York, the BOCES, are developing those K-20 ecosystems together. I'm going to be leading a Northeast Region Summit in October, where we'll have a hundred school leaders and workforce development professionals continue this conversation. And I'd like to offer the audience, please reach out. I'd love to be able to share ideas and also learn from all the great things that are happening around the country.

Julian Alssid: Well, thanks so much, Michael, for taking the time to speak with us today at this very busy time of the year, and I hope you have a great wrap-up to this current year and a wonderful summer holiday.

Michael Herrera: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and especially thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you are interested in learning more about the Work Forces consulting practice, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.