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. 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.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye, Program Director for Widening Pathways to Work at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation, addresses the critical gap between employers' intent to adopt skills-first hiring practices and actual implementation. Drawing from his background in higher education and workforce development, Agbeshie-Noye discusses the newly launched Center for a Skills First Future, designed specifically to support small and medium-sized businesses that employ half of all Americans but often lack the resources of large corporations to navigate hiring transformation. He explores the striking disconnect where 90% of employers acknowledge the benefits of skills-first hiring, yet only 15% have actively implemented it, and explains how the Center's many resources—including a Skills Action Planner, resource library, skills-first credential, and vendor database—helps employers determine an achievable place to start rather than boiling the ocean. The conversation addresses frustrations from both job seekers navigating an AI-enhanced application landscape, and employers struggling to distinguish genuine skills from enhanced resumes, while emphasizing that skills-first approaches complement rather than replace traditional degrees by treating skills as the primary currency for understanding what all credentials represent.

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: Hello all, hope you are having a wonderful time as we wind down 2025. We are back with another Work Forces "Rewind" episode before we launch our new season. Today, we're revisiting our conversation with Isaac Agbeshie-Noye, Program Director for Widening Pathways to Work at the Society for Human Resource Management (or SHRM) Foundation. In this discussion, we unpacked the critical gap between the intent to hire for skills and actually implementing the practice of doing so. Among many takeaways, Isaac shared insights on how employers can move toward a true skills-first approach to hiring. We hope you enjoy this conversation. As always, Julian and I want to express our deep appreciation for you, our listeners. We are so grateful for your continued feedback and engagement with the Work Forces podcast. Your support drives the conversations we have and the work we do. Enjoy this Rewind episode, and stay tuned—we'll be back with brand new episodes to kick off the next season very soon. In the meantime, we wish you a very happy new year!

Kaitlin LeMoine: So our conversations on the podcast and in our consulting practice recently, increasingly revolve around the movement to a skills first approach to educating, hiring and developing talent.

Julian Alssid: Absolutely Kaitlin and and today we're turning our attention to the employer side of of that equation. And this is a critical conversation for all employers, but it's particularly critical for small and medium sized companies, where half of all Americans work. These smaller companies often lack the dedicated resources of large corporations to measure and track skills development, and it makes it challenging for them to adapt to new hiring models.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's right. And while skills are all the buzz, there can be a real gap between intent and action. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM Foundation, 90% of employers acknowledge the benefits of skills-first hiring, but only 15% have actively implemented it. That's a striking gap, and many HR leaders and executives recognize its strategic value, but struggle to implement significant changes.

Julian Alssid: Our guest today is uniquely positioned to address this challenge with a particular focus on helping small and medium sized employers unlock a wider range of qualified candidates by valuing a candidate's abilities and understanding how skills relate to traditional credentials.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Isaac Agbeshie-Noye is Program Director for Widening Pathways to Work at the SHRM Foundation. Over the last decade, he's served in a variety of leadership roles across nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions, and focused on aligning strategy, culture, and operations to create lasting transformation. He's also been an instructor for undergraduate and doctoral student seminars, exploring his passion for easing student transitions through their educational experiences. Isaac earned his bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Virginia, as well as masters and doctoral degrees in higher education administration from George Washington University. Isaac, welcome to this podcast. We're so excited to have you on Work Forces with us today.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Julian Alssid: Yes, and thank you for joining us, Isaac. We've talked a little bit about your background. Well, tell us a bit more and what led you to your role at the SHRM Foundation.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: I got here in part because I'm always very fascinated and very passionate about education and how people go about learning things that then activates them to do things. And so working in higher education, and encountering all of these college students that came in at 18, 19, 20, 21 years old with some understanding of the things that they thought that they were going to do for the rest of their lives, that was just really fascinating to me. And then seeing the evolution over time where their mind changed around that thing, that was also fascinating. I ended up getting into workforce development and talent cultivation, because I realized that it wasn't just enough to understand what they were learning when they were on the college campus, I was really intrigued by then what did they do? Like, where did they go? Where did they end up? How did they navigate their careers after they left that environment? And so that kind of helped me think more broadly, beyond getting people to degree attainment to getting them actually to career mobility and to ultimately, a productive citizenry, which is what, which is what the mission of higher education is actually designed to be. And so I got connected to the SHRM Foundation in part because I just have been really fascinated with, how do we get employers into the game even further to understand their role and to help them as they are trying to tap into this workforce that is filled with skills, but yet we're not matching people in ways that are quick, even though we can see some of the ways in which there might be alignment. And so this position is is actually structured to help try and address that, that gap.

Kaitlin LeMoine: As we jump into this conversation, we'd love to learn a little bit more about the SHRM Foundation and your role in widening pathways to work.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: The SHRM Foundation is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm of the Society for Human Resource Management. And the Society for Human Resource Management is the largest network of HR professionals in the world. And so we have 340,000 members that are then deployed and activated into all types of businesses around the world. And so we believe that we can leverage HR and leverage those professionals to advance social good, which is how the foundation came to be. And so in the foundation, we focus on three bodies of work: strengthening the HR field, because we don't often think about who's going to come behind the current HR folks, and who is actually going to take on the new challenges related to HR, and how are we positioning those folks to be successful in that, and so we have a body of work that's focused there. We have a body of work that's focused on thriving together, and how are we creating cultures of care within employers and employer environments. And so how are we focusing on things like the social determinants of health, about or caregiving or workplace mental health, the types of things that make people feel seen and safe at work in order to continue to be there. And then the third part is my area, which is the widening pathways to work area which is focused on skills first, and the things that we do to help employers adopt skills first approaches. How do we test things, try things out so that we are reducing the risk as best we can for people to adopt initiatives that are going to help talent be seen better. And then the other part of that is untapped pools of talent. So who are we not seeing and how can we create opportunities to see them better and also to get them fully activated in this world of work. And so the SHRM Foundation does all of that, and our goal is to try and figure out where are, what's the messaging, what are the levers, where, who are the partners that we need to bring together to actually make this ecosystem work for job seekers and employers at the same time.

Julian Alssid: Tell us a bit more about your area, Widening Pathways to Work. And in particular, we're really interested in hearing about the new Center for a Skills First Future.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: What's so exciting about that portfolio is that we're really trying to figure out what are the things that are getting in the way, and how can we start to solution around those things? And so we know that there are 7.3 million open jobs, and we are highly dissatisfied with that, because it's not because there's a shortage of talent. There's just a shortage of alignment. There isn't those connections and those systems that we're leveraging to make talent visible so that employers can make hiring decisions that make the most sense for them are, to some degree working, and in a lot of ways not working, and that is resulting in a lot of job seekers being incredibly frustrated, and employers also being dissatisfied with what they're getting. And in an age of AI, where we do have some functions that are being shifted based on technology, and we have job seekers leveraging AI to try and make themselves look more visible and competitive, we're in this environment where we have to be having this conversation about how we get these different sides to see each other. So that is what's exciting about the Widening Pathways work, because we are going to have to be considerate of all the things that are happening socially if we're going to make these pathways wider for everybody to walk through them. The Center for a Skills First Future we just launched that in June. We're really excited about that, because this is our try to help meet employers where they are, and that type of work is critical. You've mentioned before about our specific focus on small and mid sized businesses. This is intentional, because for large and enterprise businesses where you are well resourced to try a lot of things. And, you know, figuratively, throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall. You can try a lot of things to see what works. And then you can invest, or make investments based on what you think is working. And you have teams to support that you have, quite frankly, you have teams. To try a lot of different things. For our small and mid sized businesses, they don't, do not have that luxury as much. It's usually a team of one or a team of two that are driving all of the initiatives related to human capital in the organization. And so you can't, you know, it's hard to be thinking about managing benefits and also recruitment, and also employee grievances, and also onboarding and off boarding. And so what we were trying to do is to figure out, how can we put a series of tools at someone's fingertips and let them choose their own adventure? And so that's what the Center really tries to do. So we have four major components of it, where we are trying to take resources and make them most accessible. We have a Skills Action Planner, so any organization can go in and just knowing what's going on at the organization, you can take this assessment, which will give you a readout of your current state and where you are in terms of adoption of skills first practices, and also it maps out for you your desired state based on what you said that you would like to be. And we just then curate a list of resources to help you get from point A to point B. And so we try to remind people, this is this is the time to be ambitious, but we don't have to boil the ocean. So you get overwhelmed when you think about all of the skills first things that you could do. We try to normalize for folks, but it's okay to just do one thing. Just, let's just try that one thing and see how that goes. So whether it is removing degree credentials from a job description, or maybe it's leaning into behavior based hiring, whatever you choose that makes the most sense for where your organization is, we'll give you some tools to at least try and get that momentum going. We have a Skills First credential. It's a one of a kind credential. So for folks that are trying to learn more about what it means to navigate this space and how to navigate some of the barriers you may be running into in your organization, there's a space for you to learn and deepen your skill set so you can help bring others in your organization along, which is really exciting. We have a resource library where we are amassing all of the things scholarly and practically, that have been sourced around this movement, and having it all in one place so that you can search for it however you need to and get access to it. And then for folks that are further along than know this is what I want to do. I just need a vendor, or I need a partner to help me. We have a vendor database where people can go in and just access those professional services that they need to get something off the ground to move closer to implementation. And so we created this hub with the support of 14 coalition partners to really figure out, What do employers need, and how can we make those tools most accessible to them? We're acknowledging we are operating in this space because we have the connections to employers. We're not the only people operating in this space, and everybody has a different lane that they're working in some folks focus on talent. Some folks are focusing on employers. Some are focused on community based organizations. Some are focused on policy. But we all have to be in a conversation together about this, because the ripple effect impact all of us, and so it's great to also have brought together this coalition to be having these conversations together, and so we're excited about the center, and we're excited about how it can hopefully help accelerate adoption for as many people as possible, regardless of how your organization is structured or where you are on your skills first journey.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So Isaac, given that you know, this was developed with a coalition of employers, really at the table to help inform. I'm curious to hear a little bit more. What are some of the most pressing challenges you're hearing from employers? Like, what's the perspective of, I know you said, you know, maybe just start with one thing, right? Like, maybe it's hard to take on this whole skills-first bucket of work. But I'm just curious to know, you know, what are some of the perspectives you're hearing from employers and from job seekers in this new, relatively new skills first environment that we're operating in?

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: I'll start with the job seekers. I think that the process is frustrating. This is a tough job market to be in right now, and I say that not only is someone working to widen some of those pathways, but also as somebody that had to navigate that job market. And so I'm three months into this role, and so I also was on the job seeking side, trying to figure out how I get my skills recognized and validated, and this is a hard environment to do that, particularly. When folks are also leveraging AI to make enhancements to their candidate materials, like your resume, your cover letter. And so we're finding that a lot of things because of that look the same. So it becomes really hard for employers to distinguish who has done what. And so that is a very frustrating experience for job seekers to be in, where you want to be actively participating in work, but because of the scale and the size of the job market right now, it's just really hard to stand out on the employer side. We hear a lot about there's a lot of intent, as you mentioned earlier. You know 90% of employers want to be leaning into these skills first approaches. Only 15% have actually done things that's because operationalizing a big idea is hard, and change is harder, especially when you have developed a tradition around certain types of practices that you feel like makes it easier. Like before, a degree was a signifier for you that somebody had some skill or proficiency that you wanted, and you could then filter people out by that. Now we're seeing degrees are not the only place that are telling those stories. Experiences tell us that, skills tell us that, competencies tell us that. And so how do we create an environment where employers can see all of that and then know what to do with it, because it's just so much, and in that environment, not all things operate the same or are created equal? Not all credentials are the same, not all degrees are created equal. So for a hiring manager that's just trying to understand, can this person do what I need? There are so many things to consider to try and get to that answer, and we're then finding people are going through that process of getting through that to that answer, and finding out that that you know, there's more upskilling that's needed, or there are additional supports that are needed in order for that employee to contribute and actively participate. So there's just so many things going on here for employers and for job seekers at the same time, and because there are very few mechanisms for those populations, those audiences, to be talking to each other, that's just harboring more frustration right with the process, because people are not really communicating, and also people are existing with all of these challenges that seem insurmountable to try to fix. So what we're trying to do, at least on the employer side, is make it more digestible, to make it step by step, for us to start thinking about, oh, well, have you considered this? Let's just try this first, and let's see what we're learning from this. Let's understand what success looks like when it comes to this. And one other thing that I'd like to add is, I do want to emphasize, we have chartered this Center for a Skills First Future, and sometimes there's some confusion around what Skills First actually means. And so we are trying to figure out that many different ways that people can be visible to employers and employers can recognize and validate certain skills, but we're not saying that this is a complete replacement for the bachelor's degree, and so we're not working in competition with degrees. We're trying to figure out and get clearer about the ways that degrees also convey a certain set of skills. And so we're trying to treat skills as the primary currency here for us to even understand what degrees tell us when they come across or when applications come in. And so that is one misconception that I'm hoping to clarify, is that we are not trying to campaign against degrees. We're not saying degrees are not valuable. They obviously have a lot of value, but the underlying thing around a degree, a degree is supposed to signify skills and abilities and competencies, and so we're trying to figure out, how do we get closer to that, so that whether you have a degree or not, you can still be seen and can actively participate in this job market and contribute to the workforce.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Right. And so that everyone is communicating their skills regardless of what degree or credential has been attained. It's about this is the important thing for everyone. Yep. A lot of sense, yep.

Julian Alssid: Right. And it brings us back to that interplay between work and learning and education. And again, it's complicated. We can't separate these all out artificially.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yeah, they're all in relationship with each other. I will mention anything with talent is so it's challenging because success is always moving, like the metrics with success is always changing. And it's the long game. Like, you don't know when you sometimes you know when you hire someone, and you're like, I don't think so. Or maybe sometimes you might know, but for the most part, knowing that somebody can actually perform well, it takes time and but we are so inclined to want to know whether something works right away or not, and you can't do that with people all the time. It takes a while for you to know that, okay, this decision I made, using this approach worked, and I would, and I'm interested in doing it again. And so, so we're trying to remind people that this is a long game, and we can't usually see that the ship is turning while we're in it, but you can surely look back and say, Wow, look at where we were, and look at how our processes have changed, and who we've been able to get here and then retain over time. So we are on our way there in ways that will support employers and job seekers at the same time. It makes

Julian Alssid: It makes a lot of sense Isaac, and it's interesting Kaitlin as Isaac, talking this through, it so resonates for me in terms of the work we do, which is workforce and talent development, is really complicated. And it was complicated before AI, it was complicated before skills first. And it's not getting any less complicated. And so a lot of what we end up focusing on is trying to get to start somewhere and to iterate and to get some success, and to try to build on the success. And if something doesn't work to adjust, and as you say, because each situation is so different, each, you know, down to the employee or the company or the industry. And I guess the question I have for you is, and I understand that the Center's early days. You know, it sounds like you've been giving this a lot of thought, obviously, and interested to hear about any early wins, you know, sort of specific early wins that you can speak to where companies have begun implementing skills based approaches to you pick, recruitment, hiring, training.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Or even specific tools, right? Like, which tools are working really well, right? Because I feel like it is hard to know sometimes, like, what are the resources that are really going to stick and really help the most HR professionals? Yeah, right. I mean, given the number of members you have.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: I love this question, because there are just so many. There are just so many stories to tell. And this is, in part, what we are so excited about with the Skills Action Planner, is that it does give people also because they're reporting on their current state, they're telling us about wins that they've already achieved, that they may not even be recognizing as wins. And so if you're even at a place where you got to that Planner and you can say that I've had a skills first conversation with my team, that is a win. And so we're trying to at least celebrate those things and recognize those. But what we are featuring on our site is we have a host of employer examples. And so you can go into our library and click on employer examples, and we we have sourced over 100 different examples across different industries regarding practices that people have taken on, whether it's been focusing on apprenticeship, and using that as a gateway for people to enter the organization, learn about the role, and then to develop in the role, or we have organizations that have taken advantage of different ways of seeing and recognizing skills, so that they could then provide a curated list to employees regarding the types of skills they could develop in order to be competitive for a promotion or an advancement in their job. And so we've had examples around that. We've had organizations that have shared with us about ways that they're rethinking professional development or upskilling just based on what they feel like their future needs are. And so we've had organizations that have built succession plans built on the skills that employees who are leaving are leaving with so that they know then what to recruit for and how then they need to up staff themselves in order to perform those jobs in the future. So we have lots of examples there, so that people are leaning into those for inspiration. And it's not just you looking at a checklist and figuring out I need to do A, and then B, and then C. It's you trying to figure out, okay, this organization took this approach. They're working in construction, they're working in manufacturing, they're working in retail, and they have understood that this is a problem for them, and this is how they went about trying to fix it. That may not be the approach for me, but I could take some of the things that they've applied there to think through what could actually work for me and where I am. And so the employer examples, I'm going to always be yelling off of, I'm always going to be screaming about those, because more than scholarly articles and other things, they give you some idea about how somebody took theory and actually turned it into practice, but practice that worked for them. So I do encourage folks, we have quite a few on quite a few there, because we've had to design a product that hopefully was industry agnostic, even though people are always wanting to know people are always feeling like they are a snowflake, and in the world of work, like there's nobody else like them. And that is to some degree true, but a lot of the issues that we deal with are similar across a lot of organizations, and so just seeing some examples of how people have gone about it, and a lot of different examples hopefully helps to unlock people's minds and hearts to think differently about what it could be. And so I encourage folks to check out that library, just to see some of the examples that we have in there that we're really excited about.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So building off of your last response here, I feel like what you just said about, you know, the industry agnostic tools and steps and strategies especially, but you could, you could provide industry specific examples as well. I'm curious, what practical steps do you recommend that our audience can take to become forces in developing skills, first practices? What are a couple of takeaways you can leave our audience with today?

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yeah, so I will, I will respond to that in two ways. So thinking about audience as employer, understand where you are. So we have a we have that Skills Action Planner to just position people to just understand. Can you articulate what is going on at your organization right now? What are your needs currently, and what do you anticipate your needs being? And that is it's it makes the world of difference for you to know that it provides the greatest amount of clarity, because even HR leaders or other folks who are positioned hiring managers, because you can always level set with your leadership around here's where I think we are here's where I think that we're going. Is that right? And that is useful? And so I think that all employer partners, you're representing an organization, and you're listening, that is step one as an individual, because I also think that we all have individual agency here, step one is for me. And I told folks this at a conversation I had a couple of days ago. Do you understand what your skills are? Because how can we actually convince people that a skills first approach is it matters and is important, if you can't even articulate the ways in which and for me, the person, this is how I understand my skills are being activated in the role that I am currently in. And so if there is some opportunity for you to also do some understanding of what your skills are, what are you trying to develop? How is your organization positioned to help you develop those skills where there are opportunities, where you can try small things to advance your own skill development, and then recommend some of those things to others, like we have individual agency that we can certainly activate without getting the C suite level endorsement. And so I always encourage folks to think through, what does it look like in the environment that's most local for you, in the environment where you have control, and you certainly have control over your own professional development, and so if there's an area for you to lean in and just understand where you are, I think that that benefits and better informs whatever type of approach you're going to propose that other people jump on. I'll mention we have a here. We are piloting an HR apprenticeship program, registered apprenticeship program, which we're really excited about and also naturally made sense, because HR is the folk. The HR teams are the ones that are trying to convince other teams to take on apprenticeship programs. And so it would make sense for HR to also have an apprenticeship program to understand what the pain points are, because then you can speak to it from experience, as opposed to trying to sell people on a concept or idea where they're going to present to you the challenges, and you might not know how to respond to them, and so, so I always offer that just start local, start with what's in your locus of control, and let's see what lessons you can gain from that that can inform the way that you try and bring and motivate other people to come along.

Julian Alssid: Very practical, very grounded. I really appreciate that. As we wind down this conversation, certainly, we want to keep following your work so you know there's watch just you'll see us poking around, and hopefully we can have another conversation when you're a little further down the road with the sound of it. Yeah. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Thank you for this question. The center that I speak of is located at skillsfirstfuture.org and so when you visit that site, you'll see all of the components that I've discussed here. You'll see ways where you can tell us if we're missing resources that we should add, or even if you see an article that you thought, oh, this is really interesting. I'd like to share this. We love to hear about that. We have places where you can sign up to hear more about new things as we're developing them, and we will, in the future, be building a community component on there so that people can actually talk to each other about the types of things that they're doing in real time, and hopefully get some feedback there. So skillsfirstfuture.org is where you can learn more about all the things that I've discussed, and where you can plug in and talk to us as we're learning more things about how to accelerate some of this adoption for employers that hopefully will then benefit and inspire job seekers as well.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for that, Isaac, really appreciate knowing how we can continue to follow this great and exciting new work and really again, appreciate you joining us for this conversation today.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yes, thank you for having me. This was fun.

Julian Alssid: Thanks so much, Isaac.

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 dot info forward slash 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 dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.

Joe E. Ross, President, CEO and co-founder of Reach University and the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, discusses Reach University's "apprenticeship degree" model that turns jobs into degrees rather than the traditional approach of obtaining a job post-graduation. The conversation explores Reach's approach to addressing the "hiding in plain sight" talent crisis by serving the 40-50 million Americans in the workforce without degrees who wish they had them. Ross outlines Reach's three ABCs framework: Affordability, Based in the workplace from day one to graduation, and Credit for learning at work. He shares compelling outcomes from Reach's growth from 67 candidates to over 3,000 across eight states, with 70% graduation rates for Pell-eligible students compared to the typical 40-50%. Ross also discusses the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree's work with 50 institutions across a dozen states, and offers practical steps for listeners interested in getting involved with apprenticeship degrees.

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: Hello all, hope you are doing well and enjoying the lead-up to the holiday season. As we prepare for our next podcast season, we're closing out the month with a couple of Work Forces "Rewinds", featuring two insightful conversations from this past year. Today, we're revisiting our conversation with Joe E. Ross, President of Reach University. In this conversation, we dive deep into Reach's pioneering "apprenticeship degree" model, which turns jobs into degrees rather than the traditional approach of obtaining a job post-graduation. We hope you enjoy the discussion with Joe as much as we did. While we'll be back with new episodes in the new year, we want to pause to express our appreciation for you, our listeners. Julian and I are so grateful for your feedback, your likes and shares, and your overall engagement with the Work Forces podcast. Your encouragement and perspectives continue to shape the conversations we hold and inform our consulting work every day. We'll be back to kick off our next season soon..in the meantime, we hope you enjoy this episode!

Julian Alssid: Welcome back today. We're diving deep into a topic that's central to our work, the evolution of higher education to better serve the modern workforce.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, we are Julian. We've talked a lot about the need for new models, especially those that bridge the gap between learning and earning. So many of our conversations have pointed to the power of apprenticeships and skills based pathways, including our past podcast discussions with Bob Lehrman and John Colborn on the evolution of apprenticeships and the opportunities they afford learners and employers alike.

Julian Alssid: That's right. Kaitlan and as we discussed with Bob and John, the apprenticeship movement has been gaining momentum in recent years. Just in August 2025 the Trump administration issued a talent strategy report that calls for the expansion of Federal Registered Apprenticeships, including promoting stronger connections to universities and colleges. Our guest today is at the forefront of this movement, pioneering a groundbreaking model that's reshaping what a degree can look like, the apprenticeship degree. In fact, the apprenticeship degree was called out in the Feds report as a key part of the new apprenticeship initiative. And so today, we'll be discussing this and more with Joe E Ross, President, CEO and co founder of Reach University and the National Center for the apprenticeship degree.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Before building Reach, Joe served as president of the statewide association for county school boards in California, and served for 10 years as a locally elected school board member. He previously served as general counsel to a venture studio in several technology startups, and as a deputy district attorney, he acted as sole counsel in numerous hearings and jury trials. Earlier in his career, he served eight years on active duty in the US Navy. The son of a US Postal Service labor custodian, Joe went on to earn degrees from Yale and Stanford Law School. And Joe, we're excited to welcome you to the podcast with us today. Thanks so much for joining us here.

Joe E. Ross: Kaitlin, Julian, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Julian Alssid: Yes, indeed, it is a pleasure to have you, and if you will, you know, we've said a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear you tell us a little bit more, and the story of what led you to co found Reach.

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, sure. So first off, I must offer the disclaimer, I never imagined that I would be a college president growing up. That's not the thing that was on my bucket list, among many things, but I do think I, very early on, acquired a conviction that education is the way you build your own future, I think of it as the pen that you need to have in your hand to write your own future. As you mentioned, my biological father worked for the post office as a labor custodian (that means janitor), and my mom died kind of young, and he was injured in an accident. And I was raised starting at age four by my aunt and uncle, and I think in moving into that new household, in my little head, I must have noticed that these adults had careers and they had degrees and they had power over their lives. And I think in my little head, I thought, I want all three of those things, and I got it into my head that education was my way to those things. That's the only thing I can point to as an explanation for why I was such a nerd in school and so motivated in school, and also why later, after trying all sorts of other things with that pen to my hand, I was a Navy officer, I was a prosecutor, I was an ed tech entrepreneur, I always tacked back to education as where my passion was, and so about 15 years ago, I started running an after school program that sought to turn after school staff into teachers, and that was essentially a job embedded, apprenticeship based program, the first of its kind. And I saw this, this potential of combining work with higher ed. And so fast forward to the fall of 2020, Reach University launched as it's in its current form as an accredited nonprofit institution with a very simple mission, which is to turn jobs into degrees, as you said in the intro, as opposed the other way around. And that model is called the apprenticeship degree. Now.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So you know. Reach University has a unique B2B2C model, right where you partner directly with employers, but you have this dual customer approach of working with employers but also serving the needs of your learners. Can we dive in a little bit there? I mean, this is a complex model to build. How have you gone about it?

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, so it's, it's interesting, it's complex, but it also creates some simplicity as well. If you're running an apprenticeship degree, by definition, you are running a model that's based in the workplace from day one to the day of graduation. In fact, I'll back up. I probably should share for everybody what we mean by apprenticeship degree, and then that will lead lead to the answer. So an apprenticeship degree is defined by elements associated with apprenticeship going back centuries. This is not something that the Department of Labor defined 50 years ago or 10 years ago or this summer. It's something that goes back to a tradition that is very long standing, and apprenticeships had three defining elements that I think of as the ABCs that apply to an apprenticeship degree, a stands for Affordability for the learner, and in this day and age, that means without student debt, apprentices have been asked for their sweat, not for their debt, right? So at Reach University, we made this commitment the beginning, that no one would be would pay out of pocket. No learner would pay out of pocket more than $75 a month for full time enrollment in a full time work embedded degree program that's a for affordability. B stands for Based in the workplace from day one to the day of graduation or the day of completion. An apprenticeship degree starts with a paid job. It ends, or is designed to end, with a better paid job. And C stands for Credit for work, Credit for learning at work. Kind of has a double meaning. Learning at work means literally learning at work, but it also means learning put to work, theory, meaning practice. C also stands for Credential of value. This is not a compromise. It is still a Bachelor of Arts or a Master of Arts or an Associate of Arts. AA does not stand for Apprenticeship Arts Degree. It stands for Associate of Arts degree. So with that definition in mind, let me go back to B based in the workplace. The reason we think of this as a B2B2C model, as opposed to a, B2C model is because you can't run an apprenticeship or an apprenticeship degree without close engagement with employers and for the university. What that means, among many things, is that instead of coming to the university looking for graduates, the employer comes to the university at the front end, bringing the students, you work with employers, and then the employers engage their incumbent workforce, or they actually recruit new employees into jobs that come with degrees. And so what you end up seeing is a lot of partnership work with employers, which is kind of shoe leather and handshaking and presence on the ground, as opposed to buying Google AdWords and competing in the internet for advertising for consumers. And as a result of that, a B2B2C model is much more affordable to execute, and that savings gets passed on to the apprentices, to the learners, in the form of much lower tuition, much more affordability.

Julian Alssid: So Joe, your model, in a sense, is helping to solve labor shortages. And want to hear you talk about, like, who these who these learners are, and what kinds of jobs you're preparing them for. This notion that there's like, this talent, and you know the term like hiding in hiding in plain sight, yeah, is really what you're about, yeah.

Joe E. Ross: Well, we started five years ago with our teachers college, and we were focused on the teacher shortage. And by any estimate, there's many as 30 to 50,000 structural vacancies, to as much as 300,000 structural vacancies in teaching. And what we discovered is that in the very same buildings where principals were looking for teachers where there were classrooms without permanent staff, in those same buildings, there were a lot of human beings doing other jobs that didn't require degrees. They were working as classroom aides, as library aides, they were in the lunchroom, they were in the office, driving the bus. They were janitors, like my father and each of these individuals share, typically, the same story. At some point, they had to choose that job instead of a degree to take care of their family. For example, we did some research, because this was anecdotal, and this was something we were seeing on the ground, but we did some research. You know, if you look the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there's about 1.3 to 1.5 million classroom aids in this country, if there's only 50,000 teacher shortages, you only need a fraction of those aids, a fraction of those aides to get upskilled, earn a degree, to just end a teacher shortage. That type of ratio plays out in other high demand industries. If you look at nursing, there's a nursing shortage, but there's also a tremendous number of people working in hospitals as patient care assistants, or certified nursing assistants and many other roles who, if we actually treated those people as the talent we need and give them the opportunity to rise up, we would end these labor shortages and we create this upward mobility that we want this country to stand for. We bring it to life in places, particularly rural places that are education deserts. So that's basically the story here we have, on one hand, estimates suggest about 10 million high demand labor shortages in high demand industries, and on the other hand, there's 40 to 50 million people working in the workforce who do not have a degree, but surveys indicate they wish they did have a degree. And if we can actually move higher ed to think about that population, those 50 million people already in the workforce or about to enter the workforce, as the market for higher ed, as opposed to the 3 million graduating from high school every year, or maybe in addition to the 3 million who are graduating from high school every year, it's such a win, win. Higher ed has a new mission, 50 million people who were left out get brought back in, and we address labor shortages in high demand fields, particularly in rural, remote places where often the only answer is to do a grow your own effort, as opposed to recruiting effort.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Can you tell us a little bit, Joe about how this model works like a practical level. So you said, right? You know, people learners should be, you know, receiving credit for the work that they're doing on the job. But what does it look like to implement this?

Joe E. Ross: I think the apprenticeship degree is always met with this kind of, oh, this sounds too good to be true. Somebody can have a paid job. Half the learning in their degree program comes from that paid job. The other half comes from seminars held at night or on the weekends or asynchronous instruction. There's no student debt. There's a better paid job waiting at the end of it. Employers are feeling labor shortages, individuals are getting upward economic mobility, and people are kind of like, well, that's genius. Too good to be true. How do you do you do it? Just like you just asked, here are some things that need to go into the design approach. First, employers to higher education providers need to work really closely together to make sure that the degree design meets the needs of the employer. In many ways, the employer is the customer here. They should be actually, in many cases, paying for the program instead of the learner, right? So you have to work with the employers to design now and teaching that's fairly straightforward, because every state knows what teachers need to know, and it's pretty common across state borders what teachers need to know. Similarly, in other professions like a nursing or radiological technician or other allied health fields, the standards of what you need to know in those professions as well now, but you still need to work with employers to make sure that the program design works. And then from there, the employers are also your key partners. I said earlier in recruiting their incumbent workforce, or their new hires into these pathways with the promise that their jobs are not just job type jobs, but jobs that turn into degrees and then give you upward mobility after completion of a certain set period of time. In terms of the actual design of the model, part of what's required here is to rethink some practices that are often taken as rules or laws or regulations, but are just habits In higher education. And I'll give you one example. There's something called the Carnegie Unit that is about the ratio of seat time to homework time, essentially. And this is seen as a barrier to work embedded degree programs, because, oh my gosh, we had to have this much seat time, and then people have to, have to do this, this much homework, and then they have to work 40 hours a week. How do you fit it all in? And so one of the things that we did from the beginning said, Look, you can reimagine the Carnegie Unit as being a function of seat time and work time as opposed to seat time and homework time, right? So if you can combine seat time with assignments on the job, or sense making around what you're doing on the job instead of mindless, irrelevant problem sets or whatever the case may be busy work. But actually make work work, the work instead of busy work, the work. You can actually create an environment where for a learner, and this is the objective for a worker, one plus one in this case, equals one. It should feel like their job and their higher education pathway are the same thing. That's the key element of efficiency here that needs to go into the design. And then from there, there's things in a higher education credential that people think, Well, how could you do that in the workplace? For example, you need to know English or critical thinking or history or writing, or all these things that are referred to as general education? Well, it turns out you can carefully design the liberal arts component of almost any professional or occupational degree to be relevant to that occupation. We're designing a program right now in behavioral health, for example. And to get an associate or bachelor's degree, you need something that looks like writing and reading and literature for to be a degree, but you can choose something that's relevant. So we have a semester we're designing where there's two tracks of learning. One is psychology, one, two and three, which is with one faculty member, and then there's practice on the job. And the other track is literature, but it's going to be the literature of mental illness, right? And it's going to feel really integrated with the psychology track, and it's going to be relevant to the job. So that's the kind of curricular design work that I think the apprenticeship degree needs to entail. Because at the end of the day, these are working adults, and we know what working adults need, and we sometimes are really good at giving them what they need at the graduate level, but now we have to give them what they need at the undergraduate level to make sure the associate degree in the bachelor's degree truly is working better.

Julian Alssid: It's all about that context, really, and just baking it in all around. So then, given this integration and approach like, what are the metrics that you're using to track and what's your impact today?

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, we started with 67 candidates in our pilot cohort in the Louisiana and Arkansas Deltas. That was five years ago. We'll have well over 3,000 candidates across almost 500 school districts in eight states as of this fall. So the program is growing. That's one metric that's important. And in some places, school districts and parishes are reporting the sentiment that their teacher shortage seems to be going away, which is great news, and in part, that's because of programs like, like Reach University, and that's exciting to see when, when do you get to, like, actually solve a major social problem as a nonprofit leader in your life, it's always something on the horizon. We're actually seeing shortages go away, which is amazing. Notably, the population we're serving are overwhelmingly Pell eligible. And so Pell eligibility, I think, is a good proxy for economic need. And any given semester, roughly 70 to 75% of our enrollment is Pell eligible, 37 to 39 year old folks with families and full time jobs, and so they're eligible for Pell. And the typical graduation rate at the undergraduate level for someone who is Pell eligible is a shocking 40 to 50%. In our program. It's on track to be 70% for all our almost all of our cohorts. And I think actually, we have a tailwind in this case, because the number one reason that people who are Pell eligible drop out is economics. They need a job, but in an apprenticeship degree, they already have a job. So you've removed one of the major barriers to completion of a college degree when you pair the degree with a paid job from beginning to end. And so it's not surprising that we're seeing much better completion rates. We also look at retention, you know, the you know, retention is kind of along the way. The most challenging year for a Pell eligible first generation student is the first year of college. And so you really, you can't lose 30 or 40% in year one and have anything close to a 70% graduation rate, obviously, four years later, five years later, and and so we tracked that first year persistence really carefully, and we constantly, actually redesigned our first year to make sure that our first year candidates would had a better retention. We had some cohorts we didn't really like the numbers, like it was down to 70% for one cohort or 65% for another. And we redesigned our first year to integrate the general education courses and make them more working embedded. And so this first cohort is 91 to 92% retention. That's very, very good for a Pell eligible first year persistence. And then at the end of the program, we absolutely need to look at who, not only how many are completing, but how many of those who complete are actually getting the job that is waiting for them. Very often, if not in the same building, it's in the same employer network or the same community. But how many are actually getting that job, and then in a few years, in how many of them are seeing income gains? And if there's a measure of efficacy in the job, whether it's teaching or allied health, how are they doing as compared to peers who came through traditional pathways? And it's still early days for us, because we just graduated our first set of career graduated our first set of cohorts, but early data look very, very good in terms of both obtaining the job, getting the pay raise, and being rated by their employers as better than, at least equal or better than, in terms of performance folks who came through the traditional pathways.

Kaitlin LeMoine: These are some exciting initial outcomes. I know you said it's early days, but it must be exciting to be seeing these, you know, these types of success metrics, and I'm sure hearing success stories as well, right? Those, those anecdotes and qualitative feedback on on the program. So congratulations on that. I think you started to touch upon it a little bit with the redesign of your first year. I'm curious to know, like, what are some of the challenges you've experienced in these first five years of operation, and maybe give us an example or two on how you've addressed them, because it's certainly, as you said, maybe there's elements of this that simplify higher ed, but it's a really interesting model, and I feel like still relatively new overall in the higher ed landscape.

Joe E. Ross: When we first launched this undergraduate apprenticeship degree, we literally planned the semester right in time, right so we couldn't have any transfer students. We brought people in with no prior credit, and we kind of designed that first semester for them as they took it, and then the second semester was designed just in time, and we went through the whole program designing one term ahead of the first cohort. And then when we had upper division cohorts, we started accepting and transfers. Well, we learned a lesson the first year, because the first year, we actually tried to provide four or five work embedded courses at once to our first year students, which meant they had four or five different faculty at once. I don't know what we were thinking, but it's what we did. And of course, the feedback was, this is great, but this is really hard, right? That was the feedback generally from candidates and assignments were on the same time, and people were trying to remember the name of their faculty and their faculty and their peers and all that. And, at the end of that first year, we said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, there is a best practice here that it's already out there online higher education does one course at a time. This is a best practice for working adults. We already know that. And I went to the faculty and I said, look, we've got to do one course at a time. We can't do this five courses at once. And there was a little bit of concern because our faculty who, by the way, are job embedded too. So these were folks who are working in schools as principals, assistant superintendents, as master teachers. And they understood what I was saying, but they also were like, you know, I don't think we can get to know the candidates in five weeks if it's a five week course, or in 10 weeks, if it's 10 week course. And so what we decided to do, as we built the second year is designed a single subject, not a course, but a single subject semester. How do we integrate all the courses as one subject area, where one faculty member essentially would teach three or four, three courses back to back, but they were essentially the same type of course. So world history, us, history and social studies for teachers, integrated as one experience, but three courses on the transcript as an example. And so we did that for the second year and the third year and the fourth year, and retention and persistence and satisfaction and outcomes on licensure tests just moved up and to the right and then we finally, as I said earlier, got back to the first year, and we finally redesigned the first year. We're seeing great retention the first year as well. So I think we maybe should have known this before we started, but we essentially delivered to higher ed an AB test of what it looks like to have four or five courses at once, an apprenticeship degree, as opposed to one subject at a time. And the results are kind of overwhelming. Someone should write the paper on this and get tenure somewhere. But that's, that's, that's one of the big lessons we had at the gate.

Julian Alssid: Well, speaking of challenges, Joe, we know that you know your National Center for Apprenticeship Degrees is a thing that you've launched, and that it's working with traditional colleges and universities to adopt an apprenticeship model. Interested to hear about what you're doing there. And you know, we know that, you know you're getting to design this. You know, Reach University from scratch. What's it like? And what are the you know, what are the challenges you're facing with the traditional colleges and universities? And how are NCAD overcoming these challenges?

Joe E. Ross: So we launched NCAD about two years ago. NCAD stands for National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. And in part, we launched it because we had a teacher's college. And everywhere I went, people would say, this is a great idea. Can you do this in my advanced manufacturing facility over here? That actually happened. I was visiting a school district in West Memphis, and the assistant superintendent said, you have to meet my husband. He runs this factory across the river in Memphis. I was like, okay, so I visit this factory, and they give me a hard hat, which was fun. And they're manufacturing switches for railroad tracks with all this very, very next level equipment. And they take me through the factory to the back, and there's a state of the art classroom where this employer was actually taking people out of high school and putting them through advanced math and engineering classes so they could run the equipment. And he says to me, I should be able to confer an associate degree for all the training I'm doing on the job, and it would make it easier for me to recruit people into this workplace, if I could do that. That story times 100 made it really clear that this idea of an apprenticeship degree was not just for teaching or even allied health, but that this is something that could be part of a larger workforce and human capital strategy across industries, across geographies, and we're a startup nonprofit, the idea that we could address all that demand seemed a little nutty, but we did believe that what we were doing could be something that, together with other innovators, could create a tipping point, and that the larger mission of changing higher education - bringing it into the workplace was something that we could pursue. And so we launched the Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. And your question, I think, touches on the built in challenge there, because essentially, what we're asking higher education to do is to disrupt itself, right? Like classic disruption is about a simpler product that's more relevant to a larger consumer base that's not consuming. So targets non-consumption, and it's supposed to be something much, much less expensive, right? All of those things are really, really hard for big established players to do. Now there's some big established players that have figured out how to do it. You all came from Southern New Hampshire University. Did disruptive things there, ASU does disruptive things Western Governors, but there's 4000 higher ed institutions in this country, and not all of them are going to just drop everything and create a affordable face in the workplace, degree that rewards credit for work. But what we did realize is that there are some who are doing and that this is a field that's emerging, and one of the things you have to attend to in system change is avoiding fragmentation of an emerging, fragile field. So the first thing out of three that NCAT is doing is attending to making sure we're bringing together the emerging field of higher ed institutions and innovative, forward thinking employers who are launching apprenticeship degrees to address talent needs or to get an edge on their competition, whatever their purpose is. And that has been really successful. We've worked with 50 different institutions across over a dozen states where this is beginning to emerge. The second thing we took on with the Center for the Apprenticeship Degrees is, because we're out there in the field, we're we've become aware of who is really doing amazing things in the field. And so when a system or a state or a college wants to launch a program like this, we're able to provide capacity building support. And we've been doing that in Massachusetts and Colorado and a few other states as well. And then finally, there's a need to kind of build an emerging knowledge base about this field. And so NCAD, the National Center the Apprenticeship Degree, is focused on that as well. The challenge here is, I go back to the ABCs I mentioned before. All three of them are really hard. Affordability is hard because since the 1970s most of higher ed has had the assumption of unlimited student debt without underwriting at least at the graduate level, and that's created kind of a lack of discipline around designing high quality things at an affordable price. So that's that's a big challenge. Being based in the workplace means partnering with employers and changing your recruitment, changing your design strategies. It's not that that's hard to do. It's just not in the muscle memory of a lot of places yet. And then C credit for learning at work means giving up some of the sort of ownership and the direct control over where learning happens, and letting the assessment of skills and capacities and knowledge happen in the workplace that's challenging as well. There's a book that came out a while back called Whatever It Is I'm Against It, by a former college president, and it points to how it's how hard it is, generally in higher ed to work through committees. Committees don't generally drive innovation, but that's it's actually more complex than that, a degree is something that has the fingerprints of dozens of departments. It's not just the school of education that gives you a teaching degree or the school of nursing that gives you a nursing degree. They need to provide general education, which means they have to negotiate with history and anthropology and sociology and all these places that are providing these other courses and making them work. Embedded is possible, but it's a big change. And so at NCAD, the best thing we can do is not tell people what to do, but to surface examples of other places that are similarly situated, that have actually done this. And in Alabama, the phrase that I first heard, I first heard, I first heard in Alabama from the director of apprenticeship in Alabama. The key here is R&D, which stands for rip off and duplicate, meaning like, if we can actually at NCAD, enable folks who are trying to innovate to know what others are doing and steal from them. That's the theory of change here. Because innovators and entrepreneurs, whether they're in academics or technology, do not want to be told what to do, but they're very happy to steal from steal from others. It's kind of the congenital approach of an entrepreneur. So at NCAD, we're trying to make it easy for people to steal from each other, steal from us, and steal from each other, so that this model, which is such a great model, can grow and expand and be more available.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I would say, building off that point, Joe, you know, we always ask, What practical steps could you provide to our audience around becoming forces in developing apprenticeship degrees? I mean, we could take it from the perspective of, you know, a new employer partner or, like you're saying, a traditional, a more traditional college or university that's interested in pursuing this out of an approach.

Joe E. Ross: I think wherever you sit, whether you're an employer or an educator or a policymaker, I think the first step is to stop being part of a system that forces to choose, people to choose between a job and a degree. So ask, what can we do to convert jobs into degrees that then enable people to have the opportunity to be skilled up and to rise up in their workplace. So for employers, one of the one of the big opportunities here, I think, is to move from thinking of education as a benefit, which many employers already already do, to thinking about jobs that are designed to confer qualifications, certificates, and degrees by design. Because if your jobs are not dead end, but instead developmental, you attract a different kind of talent. And there's so many young people right now, including my own children, who are out of college, who judge the quality of a job by what they think they will learn and what people will see that they have learned in that job. So think about jobs as places where your workplace becomes kind of a college campus. I think that's the call to action for employers, for higher ed leaders. I think that getting around this idea that you can deliver quality but also be radically affordable. It's hard for some to imagine, but it's eminently doable, and part of the way you do that is letting your employers drive your enrollment strategy, which saves a ton of money. And number two, really looking for effective ways leveraging technology and and best practices to award credit for work. Everyone knows that doing is a way of learning. Learning by doing is the expression, right? But that doesn't have to water down the academic enterprise. You could do so much sense making with what people are doing on the job. That makes it still true higher education. And then finally, I'd say policymakers, we're strong advocates of policymakers at the federal, state, local level, looking for ways to bring forth predictable funding that has incentives for affordability and outcomes built in unlimited debt does not incent affordability and full time enrollment dollars don't necessarily incent outcomes. So I think the challenge here for policymakers is, how do you set up mechanisms that cause the market to answer the call? If I knew that if somebody completed X amount of credit and learning in x, in y, amount of time, I would be paid Z, amount of dollars upon proven completion. I take that deal every day because I know my program achieves those outcomes, and it's a better use of public dollars, as opposed to sort of stuffing the channels, which is what we've done over the last 50 years. Basically just make it easier for people to go in debt, make it easier for people to go, encourage everybody to go. That's gotten us into this, right? So I think policymakers have a real opportunity here, with the changes that we're seeing at the federal and state level to incentivize apprenticeship degrees, to deliver the kind of outcomes that I'm talking about. And I think actually we're going to see some movement here on this front I actually think there's a lot of conversation. It is a bipartisan issue. Everybody seems to love the idea of apprenticeship, and everybody loves the idea of an apprenticeship that leads to a degree. So I think there's a lot of hope to be had here on this front.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, no, it's so true. It is definitely. And I kind of was implying that in my little first comments, that this is, you know, there's been this growing movement, and it's totally bipartisan. And I think a lot of the challenge has been that, you know, it's perceived as really hard to do and come and bureaucratic and cumbersome and and what's been so wonderful talking to you is how you know, clear eyed you are about this, how you break it down, you know. And obviously there's a lot of complexity, and I'm sure there's way more, many more challenges as of course, there always are. But that, you know, here you have this entrepreneurial pursuit that's getting things done. You have some strategies for the the legacy institutions and and, you know, at a time when there's really heightened interest and it's all over the place. Everyone's got issues. Employers can't find the talent they need. People don't want to go into debt forever and get nothing in return. And so I guess the perfect start winding down. Would love to hear from you about how our listeners can learn more and continue to follow your work.

Joe E. Ross: Well, great. I love the opportunity to invite people to visit our website and invite people to visit our social media channels. Reach.edu is where you can find Reach University. Join us there if you are interested in the National Center for the apprenticeship degree at ncad.org, N-C-A-D dot org, we have a podcast. It's called Apprenticeship 2.0. It comes out every two weeks, so tune in, and we'll actually tell people to tune into your podcast as well, because this is a great conversation for people to tune into, and the other ones have been as well. We're on LinkedIn. We post a lot of LinkedIn if you're truly interested in getting involved in this movement, if you email [email protected] someone, someone will get back to you and connect you to a way to get involved in launching and expanding the apprenticeship degree movement the United States.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for sharing all of those various avenues for people to get involved and learn more. And appreciate you joining us on show today.

Joe E. Ross: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me and I look forward to to the continued conversation.

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 dot info, forward slash 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 workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.

Amber Garrison Duncan, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), discusses the evolution of competency-based education from seven pioneering institutions in 2013 to over 600 institutions and 1,000 programs today. Drawing from her experience assessing co-curricular learning outcomes in traditional higher education and later as a grantmaker at Lumina Foundation, Garrison Duncan explains how CBE restores the promise of economic mobility by focusing on mastery of skills rather than seat time. She details C-BEN's systems-level work through initiatives like the Center for Skills and the Partnership for Skills Validation, which build consensus across K-12, higher education, and employers on quality standards for skills assessment and validation. The conversation explores how policy shifts like Workforce Pell and state-level innovations in Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas are accelerating the movement toward skills-based credentials, financial aid, and talent management systems. Duncan emphasizes the urgency of iterative innovation, comparing the current moment to the iPhone era where institutions must test and adapt quickly rather than waiting for lengthy pilot programs, and offers practical guidance for institutions to begin their CBE journey using C-BEN's Quality Framework while building authentic connections between learning outcomes and employer needs.

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 workforces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: You know, Kaitlin, it feels like just yesterday, but it was actually over a dozen years ago now that we were helping to launch College for America at Southern New Hampshire University, which was one of the very first competency-based education models. And back then CBE, it felt like a radical experiment, you know, trying to prove that demonstrating mastery of competencies and not seat time in a course was the key metric to helping people advance their education and careers.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, it's true. And while it does feel like that was just yesterday, the competency based movement has come so far in so many years. While CBE is still viewed as an alternative, non traditional approach by some in the field of education and training, many institutions have and are continuing to holistically implement competency based models to go beyond the traditional credit hour and ensure a curricular emphasis on what learners can do with what they know, and as we think about the intersection of work and learning in which we're all operating, this movement has only been further strengthened as employers further focus on skills based hiring and learners seek to clearly communicate their skills and abilities in a competitive job market.

Julian Alssid: Yes, and our guest today is with an organization that's been central to growing the CBE field, Amber Garrison Duncan is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Competency-Based Education Network, or C-BEN. In her role, Amber spearheads initiatives to strengthen collaboration between education and workforce partners with a focus on competency and skill taxonomies and quality assurance before C-BEN, Amber spent eight years as a grant maker at Lumina Foundation, focusing on higher education success. And in her early career, she served in numerous Student Affairs roles at the University of Oregon, Florida State University, the University of Michigan, Hope College, and Texas A&M University. Amber, we're so excited to welcome you to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Well, thank you for having me. It's so exciting to think back to those early days and just also how far we've come. So it's a good moment to reflect. And so thank you for this opportunity.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you for joining us and for taking this moment in time to both reflect, and I guess maybe, you know, we'll spend a little time thinking about what's ahead as well. So I'm really glad to see you today for this conversation. Amber, and as we get started, we'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and what led you to your role at C-BEN, sure.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Well, as you probably heard in my introduction, I had quite a bit of experience on a couple of campuses in higher ed, and are some of what I would call today our legacy institutions that have been around a long time and really are major leaders when you think about higher education. But in my experience there, I was doing assessment in the co-curriculum, and so I was not working in courses, and I was not working in time based measures. I was working on how students apply what they know and can do? How are they doing that and their co-curricular experiences or at work? And then at the University of Oregon, we were just getting to the point where saying, can we validate this and put it on a record for somebody? And so I was having that experience and also saw how hard it was to do, how much of a change it was to think about. Could people be learning outside of the four walls of this classroom, outside this desk, and where are they taking this knowledge? How would I know? And so from that just knew that also it was a lot of change, and was tired as a change maker, banging my head against the wall. So I said, Where else can I go? This is a systemic issue that, again, I worked at institutions across the country. Why is this so hard? And so then decided to pursue something that could support more of the system's change, and was lucky enough to be at Lumina for that which was a really transformative experience for me to see how the ecosystem is set up, why there's a lot of these incentives and barriers to change. And had the fortune to be leading a portfolio called Learning Infrastructure, and that was a portfolio focused on how we make sure that all high quality learning can count. And I learned there that the only way to maybe do that is, if we were to work in competencies and skills. Other countries around the world were figuring this out. We had to figure it out in the US. And luckily, there were seven institutions that said, Hey, we're already trying this Southern New Hampshire being one of those. And so C-BEN's origin story really is, how do we learn as quickly as possible from these seven institutions. Now that was back in 2013 when we were having that initial meeting and conversation. Today we have over 5000 members. There's no way to track fully and know how many CBE programs there are in the US, but we know there's well over 600 institutions that we know of, over 1000 programs. So it's kind of fascinating when we think about turning the ship in higher ed and how hard that is, and that in just 10 years time, we've gone from those early days to where we are now that really are proving out that CBE is a way to provide greater access. It's a way to ensure mastery, for that every learner gets the quality education and the skills they need. And then employers, again, are very much leaning forward to doing their skills based hiring by connecting with CBE programs. So that's like a quick evolution, and my history is just it's all tied up together in those two pieces. And so once I left Lumina, I just said, I really want to continue to be a part of this and continuing to help lead change. And so now I've been at C-BEN for four years, which, again, time flies, but a lot of really exciting progress to see and be a part of people's stories and watch our community grow.

Julian Alssid: It is quite a quite a story, and you're right in the thick of it, Amber. And so looking back, you know, you mentioned the seven institutions initially. I'm pretty sure we were, we were one of them at College for America.

Amber Garrison Duncan: You were the home of C-BEN at SNHU, yeah.

Julian Alssid: Looking back, what are some of the key moments in the evolution of CBE since those early days that led to the growth we see today? Because it really is quite remarkable.

Amber Garrison Duncan: It is, it is. Also a couple of things, I would say is we also like to remind folks that CBE, if we look at the theory and science of learning this, goes back 100 years. I mean, we all probably, if we came up through education, we're big fans of John Dewey and thinking about all this. And so it's, it's kind of interesting as like, the old ideas that have new ways of implementing and scaling. And I think that was always our problem, as you looked at the movement in the cities, that people really again, University Without Walls, and we're really trying to do this, but again, it's hard to do this without new tools. And our tools of the moment were not really there. And so early leaders, as technology started to be used in higher ed to say, Can we do this async? Can we do this in a more flexible way? Can we, you know, again, recognize what people already know and can do and move them on a personalized pathway, not treat everybody as a cohort and teach them all the same thing at the same time, right? So as we started to see that world move, I think that's where CBE started to take hold, and it was a lot of early online learning institutions saying, hey, let's try this thing out where, yeah, we've got this moving async, and we know we can kind of personalize this. But what if we did this instead of again based on time and a module that, again, it's based on as soon as you master and being able to lift that is, again, it's no small task. But certainly, I think early movers were trying to reach people that they hadn't been able to serve before. They were trying to make sure that, again, what they were asking people to perform and know and do was relevant. Had payoff for those individuals and those residents in the way that we all hope, that it led to family sustaining wages, that, to me, it was about restoring the promise of higher ed that we really are about economic mobility, and we needed to try something new to reach people in ways that we hadn't before. And so that, I think, has been, as I hear over and over those 600 institutions talking about why they're trying to do this is they're trying to reach people who just wouldn't have maybe come to us before, wouldn't have been able to have that learning. And again, they want to make sure that if I ask you to spend that one Pell Grant, you get, or that Workforce Pell piece, or that that's your one shot for a lot of people. And I want to make sure it's worth it to you, and that you get, again, that economic return, and so CBE really is the solution to provide that.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So building off your last comment there Amber, just around, you know, Workforce Pell and where we're headed, right? I mean, we'd love to hear, you know, what are some of the pressing challenges that you see as institutions and organizations seek to work? Work in this complex landscape, and where are there opportunities, especially around, you know, building a skills based ecosystem that involves all these parties, and really not only involves them, but I guess, allows them to collaborate and work together effectively.

Amber Garrison Duncan: You know, I think Workforce Pell is a is kind of a bellwether in the policy incentives and things that will start to shift to reward and make sure that we're paying for things that have, again, return on investments, whether that's, you know, we've been working deeply in Alabama and helping them shift their credentials of value onto what are the skills, not just the labor market demand signal and the but what are the actual skills people need, and how do we make sure those credentials are delivering on those skills, and we're paying for that, not just a completion so again, I think Workforce Pell is starting to lean that way. I think more of the accountability measures are going to be headed that way, and quality assurance being tied to that. So I think that's a huge lever for the work that we're doing, and why people can kind of land on this as a solution to answer that. But again, it comes with a lot of challenges. We are, I say we go everywhere skills go. But if you look at where skills go, it's all the proxies of time that are attached to that, so the credit hour and the just getting into the like, where do I go find a person's skills? Well, I've got to go into the LMS, and I've got to hack the course, and then I've got to hack the assessment platform and the la, la, la, la. And it's like, holy cow. So it's definitely not without challenge. And I do feel like, for the first time, we have again, the market has shifted, and people are starting to say we do need to pay attention to how hard that is. Oh, we do need to say again, should we rethink financial aid based on time and maybe have competency based measures? States again are starting to lead the way in that again Alabama, California. Folks are trying to think about new ways to pay for learning based on skills and competencies and not seat time. We're starting to see Arkansas. Just this morning. I was just reading. They were like, we're not going to call it non credit anymore. It's professional skills learning. And like, why do we again have everything attached to credit? Non credit and hours and time and again. I think that we'll continue to explore, but I do think that it also represents a revisioning of the social contract and thinking about how we pay for things as a society at a moment in time when everything feels very disrupted. But how do we have the forum and the space to talk about what that means, and again, disperse funds, or have policies or have employer engagement in these ways that we all feel comfortable with. And so that's where C-BEN, we're spending a lot of our time. How are we building consensus? How do we reshape a system and not replicate things of the past? As we were getting on, we were talking about, we now have an apprenticeship track at our conference, and we have K-12 coming. And I think now that we're starting to see all these innovators are coming up, looking up and saying, let's not build systems the way that we had them before that we don't like. Let's connect them, because people are trying to move between them. And how do we use skills and competencies to do that? And again, find new ways and new paths in this kind of reimagining using skills as the foundation. And that's what gets me too really excited, but that, again, it's a lot of challenge that we're going to have to face, because now we're talking about admissions policies, and we're talking about dual enrollment, we're talking about things that we have we thought we solved, and now we're figuring out we didn't quite solve them, and we'd like to do better. But that is, is, I think the challenge of where we go next is, how do we build together so that as we're innovating, we don't run past each other, or we don't change one side of the system and not the other. People still need that lifelong learning journey, and we've got to be able to again collaborate to do that.

Julian Alssid: So it really is this big systemic issue, and it sounds like C-BEN has been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this and trying to build and scale solutions that cut across the education and employer landscape. You know, I will say, while I agree Workforce Pell's, you know, certainly a bellwether. You know, it's not going to be a lot of money. How do we get solutions that have the employers and educators working in new ways at scale. And what do you guys see being done to advance this? You know, like we want to hear about your, you know, your new Center for Skills and the Partnership for Skills Validation.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Yes, Workforce Pell, it's going to be a small amount, but it is our first dip in something different, right, a little bit, but still tied to the credit hours, so we still have to figure that out. But baby steps, baby steps, it is, it's a baby step, it's a baby step, it is a big baby step. But I certainly, through the Center for Skills, as we are observing, again, this growth. We said, how do we get to the intersection? And so. That's where the Center for Skills really comes in and says, if we're really talking about not just skills, as in, like, what's the sentence that describes skills we're talking about, what are the new types of evidence we need to base these policy decisions on? If we're saying people should be awarded or recognized based on mastery and demonstration of skill, for award of a credential. But we're also seeing again, employers saying, I want to hire people based on that mastery. I want to pay them. We're seeing a couple weeks ago, I was at Walmart and they gathered a lot of their peers, from Home Depot to Best Buy, saying, how do we restructure our performance based talent management structures. How are we incentivizing people? How do we pay people? How do we provide recognition for their skills? That's a huge shift. Again, collectively, for all of us to be having that conversation. But again, we can't just say, What do I slap a label on, but what's the performance evidence? And that's where the Center for Skills is trying to say, let's have that conversation at the intersection of what assessment means at the end of the day, and that our perceptions and the ways that we've traditionally done assessment has to shift and change. All of us, you know, if we're older than 20, probably are used to standardized tests and multiple choice, and those are great knowledge tests. Those are things we know we can do with great rigor and validity and reliability. But what we're talking about now is a new world where things are based on demonstration of skill. It's what I know, it's what I can do. What are the different contexts I can do that in? So it's a much richer, nuanced conversation, and that means we have to have new assessment tools and new ways of understanding that and that we shouldn't, again, back to this concept of like we shouldn't go build those separate from each other. If we're trying to all use the same evidence, how do we agree? How to create that evidence? What does quality look like? So that's really what the Partnership for Skills Validation is driving that consensus from K-12 to gray, employer to here, you know, we just released the common language. How do you just talk about this in the most common way possible, demonstration of skill performance. We're observing people and their behaviors at work, or we're observing people in their learning experience. How do we talk about it? And then again, what does quality look like, and how do we scale it? And that's what we're trying to drive that conversation and be that catalyst for consensus, so that, again, these things don't get created separate from each other, and then they don't work together.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It's really amazing the work you're doing at all these levels, right? The systems it sounds like you're at the systems level. You're at the very tactical level of what does this look like to implement at one institution, or like, how do you change your technical systems to support this work, and then working across stakeholder groups and developing that shared language? I mean, it's an incredible amount of work happening simultaneously. I guess I'm wondering, how do you go about kind of speaking across your own team around some of this learning? Yeah, I imagine you're working at all these different levels and there must be some shared learnings, but also distinct things as well that maybe drive you in directions or directions you didn't expect.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Absolutely. It's like we, I'm just reflecting on we've, we've had to redo our own communications internally because of this, and part of this, I mean, the beauty of our team right now, you know, we talked about the field growing. Our team grew. You know, we had three people three years ago. We're now 25 people and these folks come from, from all the places we're working, right? So we have folks who come from. I built a higher ed program. I was a dean. I'm an instructional designer, I'm a state policy person. So we all have this lens internally that we bring to the problem solving. And so we really are solving it from every angle but, but we have to follow our own advice and internally go, what did you learn from that project? What did you learn? How are we connecting this up? Did you go let so and so, like we learned this from this institution, please go let their state policy maker know, because it is the full systems change and trying to follow and learn from each other as fast as we can, so that we can either reflect that back out to the field or again, help connect people who are trying to solve a common problem and may not realize that they're actually friends in the movement, And they should know each other, and you know, they would go further faster if they were to again resolve the policy barrier at the same time that they're building their program. So it is a unique moment to do that, but it does take just as much to work internally within the organization as it does to push this stuff out and to be able to support people on the ground and in the spaces that they're working. But I think that's unique in that we don't just do policy, we don't just do practice. We are really saying, Where do policy and practice meet, and how do they become truly informing each other over time.

Julian Alssid: Amber, are there particular places where you're finding the most traction in kind of spreading the space? Putting the word and the kind of cross pollination work.

Amber Garrison Duncan: I do think some of the states we've been able to work in have just been tremendous partners to us. Alabama, again, I think, is our most visible support of a full state movement to competencies and skills across the full lifelong of learning, all of that being then represented out in the talent triad so that every employer at every citizen, citizen in the state can participate in a skills based transformation, certainly partnering then with Arkansas and their launch program. But also just, I would be remiss to say KCTCS and our early they were one of the early seven institutions as a system, they continue their great work and and, you know, we just supported the Kentucky CPE (Council for Postsecondary Ed) to build a competency model that takes their K-12 profile of a graduate and extends that up into the associate's degree and the bachelor's degree. So again, you start to see all of these institutions that have been innovating now impacting their systems. You know, we have TBR which has three staff. Tennessee Board of Regents has three staff focused on CBE build out. Those are tremendous amount of change. And again, it shows, I think, a desire to say, how do we solve this on the ground? But we know systems change is hard, and we have to have our systems changing alongside this and working together and just states taking leadership. I will say too, we have a lot of our legacy institutions coming to the fold. University of Kansas, huge leadership in building CBE programs. We just worked with them to launch a research journal for CBE so you could see, even the folks who maybe we wouldn't assume would be at the table, you know, are at the table, University of Nebraska, Lehigh University redesigning their first year experience for engineering students based on competency. So lots of, again, folks coming to the table who you'd be like, oh yeah, I would assume that. But also some folks, you're like, I never would have thought. How cool, you know. So that's pretty fun to see.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's great. I guess you're taking us in this direction anyway, Amber, but I'll ask the question explicitly, what are a few practical steps you would recommend that our audience can take to become forces in supporting the growth of the competency-based education movement. And please feel free to take this question to the systems level, nitty gritty, wherever you want to take it.

Amber Garrison Duncan: We have kind of begun to think about CBE as not just a pedagogy, but a way of thinking about what we do, no matter where we're doing that work. And I think that's why, again, we have folks coming from research to policy to tech to whatever is that? What are we trying to really build? Is that that we want people to be able to engage in a learning experience that is authentic and real and based on what we know about how people learn that's a model, or I want to think about against being so outcomes driven, that whatever I'm asking people to engage in actually gets them where they want to go. And that's where the connection with employers, and it just leads you to this place where you're saying, Where am I the folks I'm serving? Where are they coming from? Where are they trying to go, and what am I putting in the black box here so that they can get there? And that our policies and structures should reinforce that, not again other things that we've used in the past. And so we just are, we'll be releasing a math pathways project where we sat down and said, What is, what do people have to know and be able to do around math today? Well, in that project, it just led us to the faculty, Gen, Ed math faculty, who said, I never sit down with an employer before. I had no idea. That's what nurses did with math today. But because this is an orientation to how we think about learning. We have to start with the employer, and then we're coming back and saying, okay, now that I know that again, what is it that I then help somebody know and be able to do? And how do I shift that? So it really is transformational and just a process of thinking. And then I've said to a friend once, it's kind of like in the matrix, where you're like, You take the blue pill, and you're like, I can't see it. Like, okay, this is how learning should look, and this is how it should happen. Is that it should be relevant to where I'm trying to go again, it should be flexible. Should mean something to me, and it should be applied. And that's, that's what CBE is.

Julian Alssid: So Amber, I've done some poking around the C-BEN side, which looks great, and it's chock full of good information. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Amber Garrison Duncan: A couple of things, I would say is one on our website, become a friend of C-BEN. It's free. Gets you to make sure that you have a newsletter and access to a network and community of people who are trying to work on all these issues and problem solve together. So that's a very first easy step, low hanging fruit. And then the second thing I would tell you to start with is look at the Quality Framework. Our Quality Framework is, as far as we know, the only one exists in the world. We have people come globally who say, I found your Quality Framework. We don't have anything like this in Saudi Arabia, or we don't have anything like this in Singapore, or we don't have anything like this. And so we find people starting there and saying, What does quality look like? Because if I'm going to innovate, I want to make sure I'm doing that with quality. And then the other piece, I would say, is take that and then go try to do it in new ways. We always say, too, there's not one way to do CBE, because your learners are different, your employers are different, and that is an okay thing that is that's very hard for us to get out of the mindset of an education where it's like, well, there's a this response and this intervention should look like this, and it's like, that's not we've not found out to be true. And so take that quality framework, try it out, but start somewhere. This is the thing we know. This is a transformative journey. This is not a quick, quick fix. This is an 18 month fix. But once you work that muscle and you start, it's kind of like a workout program. Start the workout program. Just keep going and showing up every day and solving for that next problem, and you will be transformed at the end of it into something that is again, more relevant to learners and employers. And we're seeing enrollments go up. We're seeing great outcomes for individuals, but you have to get on the road, and I would say, the sooner you get on the road, the better. Again, we're not seeing the slowdown. We're actually seeing it accelerate. There are now, again, policy. We're just talking with all the Texas people. Texas legislators passed a House Bill 4848 that said every public system of learning has to have at least one CBE program in certain in-demand fields, and they have to have it in a year. So folks are again, getting on, which is kind of scary. That's scary because that's fast. That's really fast, but I think that is, again, a bellwether of people are tired of the status quo and need something different from us, and so we're going to have to do something so just grab the Quality Framework, get to work, trying some things. Let us know how we can help.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Really appreciate that. Amber, I think you know, I feel like I'm so struck by the number of conversations we have on this podcast that end with, start small, start somewhere. Let's make sure we get going, even if you don't have everything worked out, because if you don't get started, you can never really move the needle or see where the points of pain are, or see where the points of innovation are. So really appreciate that call out. It feels so critical, especially at this moment in time where, yeah, like you're saying, things are moving very quickly.

Amber Garrison Duncan: I always, and this is probably, like, silly, but I always use the example too, of the iPhone in higher ed. We have been so research oriented. Again, I got to try it and pilot it and learn from it for three years. We don't have three years. We have an iPhone moment of get something out there, collect data. Change. Change every six weeks, if you need to. But that is the pace and the urgency of now that is going to require us to work differently. We can't wait for five year program reviews. You better be getting in there with those employers. And in that Alabama example, for the Credentials of Value, we're meeting quarterly to review labor market demand and change updating skill sets. So that's again, when I talk about pace of change, it's going to feel very chaotic, but use your data and insights to ground you and do it more frequently than we've ever done it before.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Amber for this conversation. I mean Julian, I think I think I can speak for us both when I say this topic is very near and dear to our hearts. And you know, we're so excited to have been able to take some time with you to get the current and future state of the field, lay of the land. Really, really appreciate this dialog.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, and you're always a friend of the movement, you you are. You are the sparks of the movement. So it's been fun to reconnect.

Julian Alssid: Thank you so much, Amber, really, really do appreciate the reconnect.

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 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.

Dan Gonzalez, Co-founder and CEO of District C, discusses how his nonprofit is democratizing access to authentic workplace learning through Teamship, a reimagined internship model where teams of high school students solve real business problems. Drawing from his background as a physics teacher and education entrepreneur, Gonzalez explains how District C emerged from early conversations about AI's impact on work and the need to develop uniquely human, durable skills. He details the program's innovative design—breaking abstract concepts like "teamwork" into observable behaviors and coaching protocols—and shares how they've made the model accessible to over 7,000 students by embedding it in Career and Technical Education courses. Gonzalez describes their low-lift, high-impact approach to employer engagement that requires just five hours of business partner time across four to five weeks, enabling 700 employers to participate without the complications of traditional internships. The conversation explores their test-and-learn philosophy from startup through scaling, the dramatic student improvement across multiple cycles, and practical strategies for both educators seeking to implement experiential learning and employers wanting to support youth development while addressing real business challenges.

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.

Welcome to today's show. It feels like every day we're both reading and hearing about the importance of experiential learning opportunities for students while enrolled in college, and more and more so in K through 12 education, while the importance of these opportunities has been recognized for many years, efforts to develop authentic applied learning in real world contexts at scale have become front and center.

Julian Alssid: It's so true, Kaitlin, we're seeing a significant alignment around this. More employers are actively seeking practical, applied skills earlier in the talent pipeline, and educators and learners alike are seeing the value of academic learning applied in real world work environments. Authentic projects are becoming an integral and essential part of the learning experience.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Exactly, and with all that being said, we're really looking forward to our discussion today with Dan Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of District C, a national nonprofit that prepares the next generation of diverse talent for modern work. District C offers a unique program called Teamship, which is a reimagined internship where teams of students solve real problems for real businesses.

Julian Alssid: To provide a bit of background. Dan studied engineering at Dartmouth College before becoming a high school physics teacher. After teaching, Dan joined Manhattan Prep, a global leader in test preparation, and became president of the company in 2011 shortly after it was acquired by Kaplan. In 2017, Dan co-founded District C and has been working on its build out since. We're thrilled to have you on the podcast, Dan, and thanks so much for joining us.

Dan Gonzalez: My gosh, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We're really excited to have the chance to speak with you today, Dan. So as we get started today, we'd love to learn a little bit more about your background and what led you to founding District C. Tell us the story.

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, so one, one interesting, what I think is an interesting kind of founding story about the founding is my wife and I started District C together as co-founders. We started our research back in 2016 and we both quit our jobs at the same time to invest full time in District C. And I think what we were seeing at the time was, you know, obviously people have been talking about artificial intelligence for many, many decades, but around 2016, 2017 the conversation started to come into the national forefront as it relates to work and preparing for work. And we were kind of trying to look ahead and imagine what do we need to be preparing students for if we are kind of confronting this reality of an AI dominated workplace, and so, you know, at the time, this was a couple of years after the code.org put out that video, and there was kind of this national movement around preparing students to be coders and software developers. And the thing that we are trying to imagine is, all right, if, if we are thinking about how to prepare young people for any job in the future with the skills and competencies they need to cut across any industry, how would we design a learning model that would do that? Now you can call them professional skills, durable skills, soft skills, 3Cs, 5cs, 10, Cs whatever you want to call them, but these like uniquely human skills, and that's what we were after, and that's what we set out to try to figure out.

Julian Alssid: So you were you? You were talking AI practically before it was born.

Dan Gonzalez: Maybe, maybe not, not so, so early. But I would say, Yeah, we were thinking about it back then. And I think, like, obviously looking back now, we feel like it was the right place to be focused. And I would say one challenge we had early on as we were thinking about building a program like the one we built, is a lot of conversation was centered on, as I said, coding, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial education. And so it was hard to cut through some of that conversation. And even though there was a lot of discussion around portraits of a graduate, how do we help students develop durable skills, soft skills, the default in education, as you all know, is to kind of generally come back to the content and focus on the content. And so things like coding, entrepreneurship, etc., stem where content tends to be at the front and center, those are the things that tend to carry the day in education conversations. So we had a little trouble initially, kind of cutting through some of that and really trying to focus on all right, if we're serious about durable skills, how do we really get down past the abstractions into learning models that really help students develop these things. And so it took, you know, a couple of years of trial and error and experimentation with the model that we built before we started to kind of feel like the conversation was changing.

Julian Alssid: Okay, so, how? So, how are you teaching durable skills? What is the program model? Yeah, yeah. This is the question everyone wants to know.

Dan Gonzalez: So the program model is called Teamship. You can think of Teamship as a reimagined team-based internship, where teams of students solve real problems for real businesses in the community, and all the while, they're getting coached by an educator who's been trained and certified by District C and so students are getting proactive support as they're going through this generally 25 to 35 hour experience. The thing that we learned early on was putting students in teams and asking them to solve a real problem actually ended up being the easy part of the model. Of course, it takes work to go out and find businesses, engage them, prep them, Tee them up for the experience, etc. And that's a whole system of work that requires attention and care. But I think what we learned was the most difficult part was helping students actually get better at the work. So it's not enough just to create the experience and create the context for the experience to help students actually develop these skills, you actually have to coach them proactively and consistently, and as I mentioned before, kind of break away from the abstractions and get down to observable behavior. So just as an example, if I were to say Julian and Kaitlin and I'm watching you do your Teamwork, you're solving a problem for a business. Just keep in mind, be team players. Respect your teammates. Those are abstractions, right? Students don't really know what to do with that, that kind of coaching. So what we try to do is break those abstractions down into ways of working, tools, protocols, et cetera, that we can coach students on and actually observe those in their work. Instead of, Hey, be great team players. I might say, hey, Julian and Kaitlin, which set of your tools do you think you can pull out to make sure that you're getting better equity of voice in your team conversations, and they should know like, Oh, if I take tool X, I and Z and snap them together, it will create more balance of voice in our team conversation, and our work is going to be better. Our thinking is going to be better, our ideas are going to be better. Trying to break away from the abstractions and get down to the observable behavior. I think that was an insight we had early on that we really tried to build off of in subsequent years.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I feel like that response has...now I have so many other questions about the program model, but I mean, I guess one area I'm curious to hear a little bit more about is so you partner with employers and with schools to offer this program. And what is, what does the program the 25 to 35 hour model, what does that look like in schools? Is it held after school? Is it during the school day? Is it held in collaboration with a classroom instructor? Is there a range?

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, great question. So most of the Teamship experiences that students get are through their schools. And so you're exactly right. We generally partner with Career and Technical Education departments, so at the school district level, at the K 12 level, and then we work with them to identify schools that are going to adopt the Teamship model, to identify teachers that are going to go through our training and certification process. And then we support these teachers in implementing teamship In generally one of two ways. The first way is as a 25 to 30 hour experience embedded in one of their existing courses. The second way is building an entirely new course that is Teamship exclusive. So imagine a semester-long course where students do two or three Teamship cycles over the span of a semester, and each cycle, they're with a different team of students, and they're working on a new problem for a new business. So that's generally that's the predominant model, and the reason for that is, I know from, you know, back when I was young, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I got an engineering internship because my dad knew someone, right? So I asked my dad, hey, could you help me get an internship within a week? I had it. I think we know that students with family connections and social capital, they generally don't struggle to get these kinds of experiences. But what about everyone else? So one of the keys to the Teamship design was building it so that it could be delivered and provide access to many more students than typically get these kinds of powerful workplace learning experiences. And that meant designing it so that it could be implemented at school during the school day. So that was a key kind of design constraint that we went into many years ago when we built this.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I would imagine too to have the opportunity to engage in multiple of these experiences over a learner's journey through their high school experience would be really powerful to, as you said, build upon and continue to practice and learn some of these human or durable skills that you know take time to learn and hone, right? I mean, it's not like this isn't just because you've engaged in one of these experiences doesn't mean you couldn't engage in another, I assume.

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, and you all, of course, are bringing a ton of your own experience to this conversation. That is exactly the right insight. I think it was two years after we started. We piloted our first semester long course. We got 16 students from four different schools in the Raleigh, Durham area of North Carolina, and we essentially taught a course for those 16 students. They did three cycles over a semester, three Teamship cycles. And we were, I think we were taken aback at that the step wise improvement from cycle one to cycle two was kind of astounding. Like, once they get the first one under their belts, they can look back and reflect and say, that's what this is about. This is such a different experience for them, right? It's so different from traditional school. And so once they have one under their belts, they're able to, just like adapt very quickly, set new goals for themselves for the second cycle, and the level of their work just improves pretty dramatically. And so I think we realized in that moment, the most ideal implementation mode is one where students get multiple touches on the ball for exactly the reasons that you mentioned.

Julian Alssid: Okay, so, so staying on the path of specifics, this is great. It's really, really fascinating. And so much of what we try to do is unpack and understand, like, the school side I get, how about the employers? I mean, you know you mentioned earlier, like, yeah, sure. You know, most people are getting it's mostly word of mouth. For most people, that's how they found an internship. How are you engaging employers at scale? How do you find and support them?

Dan Gonzalez: So we have a team of people that is dedicated just to this work of engaging employers. To date, we've had, I think we're at about 700 employers who have engaged in this work. Some of them engage once. Some of them engage twice, three times. I think we've had some engage as many as nine or 10 times. The number one key is creating an opportunity for employers that is low lift, high impact. So we want to make it as easy as possible for them to say yes, and before they understand the details of the experience and what their role would be. They often come in with the assumption that their role is going to be kind of like it would be for a traditional internship, which is, all right, I'm going to have to manage a group of students over multiple weeks and multiple hours per week, right? And a lot of times, companies are hesitant to do traditional internships or offer traditional internships for high school students. Number one, because there's a whole bunch of like legal considerations when you're working with minors. Number two, they're often skeptical of high school students' ability to add real value to their businesses, right? So what we try to do is counter both of those potential skepticisms, right? So the first thing we say is, look, this is going to be a five hour experience for you over the course of four to five weeks, the first hour or so is going to be working with us to scope the problem. We're going to actually write the problem statement. We're just going to kind of interview you business partner to understand what's keeping you up at night, and then we're going to craft a business problem statement that will be accessible to high school students. And then the rest of those five hours, you're going to meet with the student teams three times, and the first time, students are going to come in and they're going to interview you, they're going to run the meeting. So all you have to do is show up and represent your business and your problem. The second time is a midpoint check in. They're going to come with some initial ideas, maybe ask you a few more questions, and then the third time, they're going to propose their solutions to you in kind of a boardroom style meeting. And so for the business partner, the reaction typically is, so I don't really have to, I don't have to mentor the students full time during this experience, and the answer to that is no, the teacher who's been trained will do that part. And so it's an easy ask that they can say yes to, given that the students are owning those three meetings and facilitating those three meetings, it's easy for the business partner to plug in. And so the first time, we make it easy for them, and they generally want to participate because they want to do good in their community. And then I think they realize that we have evidence to suggest, they realize the power of the opportunity and how much value and benefit they get out of it, and so that's when they're out for a second and third time. So that's kind of the strategy that we try to employ, that we've kind of refined over the years.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So Dan, it's really interesting to hear you talk about, as Julian said, both the employer side of this and the school side, as you reflect on, I mean, you said this was you started in 2017 so you've been building this for the better part of eight years at this point. I mean, tell us about your growth trajectory. What are some of the challenges and opportunities you've encountered as you've built District C, because I would imagine that, you know, you've addressed a lot of challenges that maybe others are, you know, wrestling with day to day, and how to make this type of really authentic work, and these types of authentic projects happen in schools and communities.

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that question. When my wife and I started this, we were both first time entrepreneurs, and so we were simultaneously wrestling with like, okay, what's what's like, the education part of this, and then what's the entrepreneurship part of this? Like, we're two new entrepreneurs trying to start something that matters and trying to make an impact. And so I think, like, one of the big challenges for me, just like a personal challenge for me early on, is I went from a job where I would wake up every morning and I'd have eight hours of meetings blocked on my calendar, and it was just back to back to back, right? And then starting District C, I'd wake up in the morning and there'd be nothing on the calendar. All proactive, right? It was all like, go out and make it happen. And that was a really difficult transition point for me. And I think one, I had a lot of impatience early on, and like wanting to see results and outcomes. And I think one learning and reflection is this kind of stuff, like when you're building something new from scratch, it takes, it just takes time. You all know this, I see the head nodding. You know this experience, it takes a lot of time to build traction. I think one of the things that, in retrospect, a good decision we made early on was we didn't, we didn't hold ourselves to getting it exactly right the first time. Instead, we took kind of a test and learn mindset, and so the first thing we did is we got 10 or 11 students around, around the community, and we just tried the first version of the program that we had dreamed up. And we learned so much from that, that first pilot, from that first trial, and we just kept building on it. And honestly, we didn't worry about the business model, we didn't worry about the scale model until we felt like we had enough reps on kind of coaching students through Teamship, where we felt like, oh yeah, this is, this is what we want to kind of put out to market. And so I would say the first phase was proving demand. Do students want to do this? Will business partners engage? And once we felt like we had a check mark in that box, then we thought about the business model. So as a nonprofit, how are we going to fund this? And what we decided was we're going to do it in a fee for service approach, so we're going to partner with school districts and they're going to pay us to deliver this service. And that is ultimately going to be the thing that will indicate for us whether this is working or not, is our districts, will they? Will they pay us for this? And so that was, that was kind of the second phase, was building the business model. And then the third phase, which we're in now, is scale. So how do we prove that we can scale this nationally with high fidelity and continue to kind of see the results that we're seeing? So yeah, those are, those are the phases we went through.

Julian Alssid: So as you're now in this scaling phase, how are you continuing to monitor your success and you kind of, you know, what sort of data you collect. How are you using that for scale and continuous improvement?

Dan Gonzalez: I would say the primary answer is, we try to stay really close to the work, observing students doing the work, you know, staying in close contact with teachers and coaches who are coaching students so that we're getting constant feedback from them on what's working and what they're struggling with. We also do some formal surveying of students and teachers and business partners to get a sense for like, hey, you know, at the most basic level, would you recommend this experience to someone else? And so we monitor that kind of data. We asked students to self report on their growth along two dimensions, one, their confidence in working in teams and their confidence with solving complex problems. So there's some self report data there. So I think piece number one is trying to, just like stay close to the end stakeholders and users and understand what their experience is. The second thing, as I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, is, is like through market signals? So when we're having conversations with prospective district partners, are they, are we, is this concept resonating with them, and is it resonating to the point where they're willing to spend some of their budget to put this in front of students? Right? And so I think that has been an important, just like market indicator of how valuable this, what is the perceived value of this kind of work in the market? The thing that I think we need to get our ducks in a row on is, how do we measure the long term impact on this? And so I think the dream state for us would be, you know, understanding from our student base, from our alumni at age 25 or 30, say, versus students who have not done Teamship, what is what is your level of well being? What are your employment outcomes? What is your annual salary? And comparing that against students who haven't been through the experience just to see, like, are we getting kind of the scalable impact that we want? And that, of course, as you can imagine, just takes a ton of work to think about how to design that, that system that would give us that kind of input.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So you mentioned, Dan, you know, kind of monitoring, like staying close to the work. It makes me wonder too. As you've talked about the growth of this program over time, where are, where are the programs located at this point? In which states do you operate?

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, we've had students participate from. I think it's 16 states at this point. And that's a little misleading, because in some states that might be one or two students who opted into a virtual program that had students from multiple states.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Oh, neat. Yeah.

Dan Gonzalez: The vast majority of our work is in North Carolina. It's where we live and where we got started. But increasingly, we have programs running in Virginia, Wisconsin, a new, new partner in Texas. And so, you know, honestly, to this point, we haven't really had a state, state strategy as much as we've just like followed the energy. So where we get interest will partner, and where we have the right mission alignment with partners, that's where we invest our time. And so it's kind of just by happenstance where, kind of these pockets of activities are happening?

Julian Alssid: Do the relationships with the districts look similar around the country? Is there? Is there? Is this evolving? Is this building out? Yeah, I would say, generally speaking, they do. So usually the first conversation is with the Career and Technical Education Director at the district level, and the implementations tend to be in CTE courses, oftentimes in entrepreneurship or business principles or marketing courses, what have you. And so we're definitely seeing some patterns in terms of how CTE directors are valuing this work, where they're trying to plug it in, why it matters to them, but certainly on the edges, you see variations and kind of custom implementations depending on specific geographies and program needs. And I would say most of the time a school district is wanting us to help them engage businesses in their backyards. Sometimes they want to expose their students to businesses that exist in other parts of the country, but usually they're trying to create a community around this work in their region. And they're often bringing really deep relationships with business partners that they want to deepen even further. And they see teamship as a way to engage them on a different level.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So with your response to that question, I feel like we're kind of naturally going in this direction, but we always like to tie the podcast conversation a bit to the title of the podcast, which is Work Forces. So thinking about everything we've talked about today, and I think you've given us a lot to think about here, Dan, but what practical steps can our audience take to become forces in supporting secondary school learners to obtain applied learning experiences.

Dan Gonzalez: I think teamship is a great way to connect the education community, the educator with the business community. And so I would say, if you are running a program for young people, whether it's a workforce development program, program that exists in a community college, or a higher ed setting, or in a K 12 setting, a Teamship is a great way to get students involved with businesses in the community. If you are a professional that works for a business and you're interested in doing what you can to help young people prepare for their futures. Obviously, we're always looking for business partners to engage in this work, and would love to have a conversation. I think, though generally, just beyond Teamship as we're thinking about preparing, preparing people for their futures, I think kind of embracing a shift from hey to prepare for a job or a career in your future, you need to develop skills around this very specific type of job or career, right? And it's, it's generally skill based, you know, relative to a career pathway or a career sector, whatever it might be. And I think that's really important, especially as jobs are changing and the types of jobs that are emerging these days we hadn't even imagined 10 years ago. So certainly, there are skills and competencies that young people need, but I think we need just as much weight on the transferable skills that students can take across any career path or any career journey that they might embark on. We talk a lot about the importance of durable skills, but I think we need to get really serious about how we help students develop those. And I think there's employers have a responsibility to help educators think about that and to engage in that kind of work.

Julian Alssid: Yeah. I mean, I think, and especially with fluidity in the job market, and it's more and more about, you know, what are the bucket of skills you've accumulated, and how can you now apply them in new realms and new places, both to figure out what you like and where you want to go and where's the fit, but also because everything is in flux. So I think you know this, this idea of having a series of experiences where you're building these skills, and there's a lot of overlap, and the durability develops in that build.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and I do think too, I mean, for high school learners, I think often, course work is subdivided right into these, into particular subject areas. And it's like actually, though, in most settings, we're not working in a one subject area, right? We're working in a cross-disciplinary way, and to make that more transparent for people and to like have these types of team based experiences, project based experiences that integrate those skills, I think, helps to proactively and intentionally share exactly what you're saying, Dan, right? That like we don't like as much as you, of course, need to focus on building out specific knowledge and skill domains. There's a lot of integration, and it's actually in the integration of those skills where a lot of the magic happens.

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, well said.

Julian Alssid: Yes, indeed. Well So Dan, as we wind now, in our conversation, this has been really fascinating, so you know again. So appreciate your time, and wonderful to hear how you, your just your own process, your own thought process here and how this has all unfolded. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Dan Gonzalez: Yeah, so district c dot co is our website. We have a page on there called the latest where we have updates, and there's a contact form there, and so that's how most people will find us and reach out. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I'd love to, love to hear from you. Would love to continue this conversation. And yeah, that's a spot you can get in touch with me directly.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Dan, it was thanks so much for having me. Kaitlin and Julian. I really appreciate it. Thanks for doing this work. It's important.

Julian Alssid: Yes, thank you, Dan.

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 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.

Rick Laferriere, Lead Director of Workforce Initiatives at CVS Health, discusses his team's 25-year commitment to building what he calls "non-traditional talent pipelines" by partnering with workforce systems, educators, and community organizations to reach individuals who face barriers to employment. Drawing from his own journey starting as a CVScashier in high school and spending over 30 years with the company, Laferriere shares the philosophy behind creating relationships rather than transactions with community partners. He explores the complexities of operating across all 50 states where workforce systems, funding priorities, and political landscapes differ dramatically, emphasizing why customization matters more than one-size-fits-all approaches. The conversation delves into practical strategies for employers looking to engage in workforce development, including the importance of sharing curriculum and training rather than keeping it proprietary, offering work-based learning experiences before hiring, and dedicating resources to build genuine partnerships. Laferriere also addresses the challenge of measuring success in work that carries both quantitative and qualitative value, explaining why his team takes pride in the fact that only 30% of program participants come to work for CVS while the other 70% strengthen the broader community workforce. He calls on employers to get curious, join workforce boards, and find champions within their organizations who can balance passion for community impact with demonstrating business value.

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 workforce's podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: Welcome back. For a long time, the education and workforce system was tasked with preparing people for jobs, with employers often playing a more passive role. But that dynamic has shifted, with employers increasingly leading the way on workforce development.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It's true, Julian employers have stepped into that gap, not just to solve their own talent gaps through internal training and upskilling initiatives, but also through broader partnership initiatives designed to expand the overall talent pipeline, to reach and educate those who may otherwise not know about those career opportunities, or those who previously faced barriers to employment or educational attainment?

Julian Alssid: Yes, absolutely Kaitlin. And as more companies are seeking to innovate in this space, it's helpful to look at models that are established and continuing to respond to the evolving needs of their industries and the labor market. Our guest today is Rick LaFerriere, Lead Director of Workforce Initiatives at CVS Health. Rick leads CVS award winning programs that are designed to create opportunities for people facing barriers to employment, partnering with education, community organizations and government agencies to build bridges to meaningful careers. Rick serves as the advisor to CVS Health Abilities in Abundance programming, and has oversight of CVS, highly regarded Workforce Innovation and Talent Center concept. He also contributes his time and expertise in the workforce space to several advisory and workforce boards locally and nationally. Rick, welcome to Work Forces.

Rick Laferriere: Thanks, Julian, Kaitlin, nice to see you both and glad to join you today here. This is great.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, thanks so much for being with us today, Rick. It's great to see you as well, and looking forward to jumping into this conversation today. So as we get started, could you please tell us a bit more about your background, your trajectory, and what led you to your current role at CVS Health?

Rick Laferriere: I've been with CVS Health for over 30 years. I actually started in a local CVS Pharmacy store when I was in high school as a cashier. And so my career here started at entry level in our stores, doing customer service. And at the time for me it was, it was a job to make money, to save money to go to college. And interestingly enough, it turned out to be a lot more than that. I ended up staying with CVS throughout my time at college. I went to school at Boston College and ended up working at CVS all throughout my college career, and when I graduated from college, realizing I had five years with CVS and an opportunity to continue in the management program, I jumped at it. It was an easy transition for me from college into the workforce and to the full time workforce. And so I ended up working on our retail side of the business for about eight or nine years as a store manager in the management program, being at ground level, really working with customers and patients in our stores. And then one day, at the end of 2007 I got a tap on my shoulder asking me if I wanted to run our brand new Regional Learning Center in Boston, which was this new concept of having a training facility, co located inside of a community partner, and in this case, it's Jewish Vocational Services in Boston, where we could work together with JVS and other community organizations and government agencies and the educational community to provide individuals from the communities we serve with the opportunity to engage in workforce and education. And at the time, I'll be honest, I didn't know much about it. I didn't know much about this team. I didn't know much about the workforce or the education space. I had had all my time at retail, but it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. So not knowing a lot about it, I said, sure, let's go for it. Let's do this. And so at the beginning of 2008 I joined the Workforce Initiatives team. Still here today, 17 plus years later, and it's pretty amazing to me to think about this journey, because I never expected to be here. I never expected that this, this was going to be my career. I never expected that I would be so invested in workforce and education and supporting people with barriers to employment. But I quickly realized after I joined the team that this was this was my calling. This is where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in this space. I had the passion, the creativity, the interest of doing it. So hopefully, my career has grown since I've been with the team. This is my fourth different position on the team. I'm now co leading the team, along with two of my colleagues. We have a team of about 40 across the country. And so when I think about the work that our team does, and I think about my own pathway here, they're very similar. We want people to engage in careers with us, because you never know where you'll end up. And I did not know that I would end up here, but I certainly am glad I did.

Julian Alssid: You're the embodiment of walking the walk, I guess, or talking the talk, or whatever that term is, even though it's really, really cool. So today, then Rick, your current role, you know, what are the main workforce challenges that you're looking to solve in this role? And some of the key initiatives?

Rick Laferriere: Our workforce initiative team has actually been around for 25 years, and at the core of what our team does, it's building what we call non traditional talent pipelines. Think of a traditional talent pipeline is what your talent acquisition team is doing the standard sort of recruiting approach. Our team takes a non-traditional approach, which is working with the workforce system and with education, looking at individuals who tend to be overlooked, who tend to face barriers to employment, and working with the community, working with government to build programming that helps folks attain the skills they need to come to work for us. And folks know CVS Health, mainly because of CVS Pharmacy, which are our retail stores. And of course, we've got, you know, we've got thousands of stores across the country. Retail tends to be a very high volume, high turnover type of industry. And so, you know, part of the strategy for our team and our company is, how do we find people who we've never engaged with, and have not been in the workforce, or have never considered retail for a variety of reasons, and get them interested in coming to retail. And so for us, you know, there's a bit of an existential need for talent. You know, we're constantly looking for folks for our stores, for the front part of our stores, for the pharmacy part of our stores. And you know when, when you've been doing this for as long as we've been doing it, you discover that the community has, in some way, shape or form, engaged with us at some time, but they may not know enough about our careers and our opportunities. And so there's, there's a portion of that, which is just engaging the community about what it's like to work here. But at the same time, the other part of this is being a solution to filling skills gaps and to providing people with opportunity to enter the workforce. And so for us, we are constantly hiring. We're constantly growing. You know, healthcare, even retail pharmacy is still growing. So we always need talent. And if you, if you're doing it the same way with your talent acquisition folks, or you're doing it, you know in a traditional way that others are doing it, you're gonna you're gonna run out of you're gonna run out of talent to find at some point. And so our team's job is to find new talent and find folks who have not been engaged or don't feel like they fit into the workforce or have a barrier, and so that our team is is in the community, doing that, digging deep to find folks who want to come and work for us, opening the doors to opportunity, showing them what it's like to work at CVS, and then putting someone like me in front of them, saying, I started at entry level in this company, and now Here I am. I never thought I'd be here, but here I am in a leadership role, you know, 30 plus years later, and so we really try to frame it up to the community that we want to work with them. We want to provide you with skills and training and opportunity to come and work for us and grow and eventually thrive.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It strikes me as you painted the picture of how you have that conversation with an individual around like here are the opportunities available through CVS that there really is this, this customized approach to working with individual learners, but even I would imagine the community organizations themselves. I'm curious, building on that, what are some of the challenges and opportunities that you've come across as you address workforce needs, recognizing that I would imagine each area is different, and that you work across many states and regions.

Rick Laferriere: Yeah, each area, region, state, is completely different, and that is the biggest challenge our team faces. Which is finding out how we best fit into workforce. You think about how workforce is set up broadly, you know, in the flow of federal or state dollars into workforce, programming and education, every state has a different priority. Every state is focused on different industries, has different populations, has different political goals as well, and all of those pieces factor into what workforce looks like. And so as a company that has a presence in all 50 states, we need to figure out how we best fit into those landscapes in each of the 50 states. What we do here in Massachusetts, which is home for me in terms of workforce, is entirely different than what it looks like in Texas, than in Florida, than in some western states. But the Northeast tends to be a bit more similar in terms of workforce and how states support workforce and the industries here. But if you're not familiar with sort of what that looks like as an employer. You're going to struggle to find your place in that workforce system. And if you come at it with a one size fits all approach, or you come at it with, you know, say, a team or an individual as an employer that is walking in with with no knowledge and no understanding of how workforce and education works in a particular region or state, you're not going to succeed. You're going to need folks who can dig deeper and understand the landscape and understand how all of that works, and also express what you're looking for as an employer. So you know, for us, it's it's challenging to understand all of those different spaces, but our team was built and designed to do just that, to understand how workforce operates. And of course, we have to do that as a big national corporation. If you're a more regional or local employer, you're able to dig in deeper where you are. And so, you know, there's certainly a little less complication for the smaller employer dealing in a smaller area, but as a big national employer, you've got to figure out everybody's systems. And so we've deployed a team that does just that, that learns and understands what what each workforce system is doing, how they're funded, how they're funding vendors or providers, what the adult ed landscape looks like, what the community college landscape looks like, the education, all of those pieces are important factors into what we do to build programming that likely is very customized, not just to us as an employer, but customized to the population, the funding, or the community partner or the provider that's doing it and really building something that works locally. Because what we found is that if we build a book and we just hand that book out to everybody and we go, here's the book, it's not going to work. It isn't going to work for a certain population. It's not going to work for a certain region, all of those pieces. So for us, customization is critical and key, and thankfully, CVS has invested in a team like ours to figure that out. And so I think that, you know, we're really well positioned as a team to do that, because we get local, because we understand, you know what, what the priorities are in each state with the federal government as well, and that helps us do our jobs even better.

Julian Alssid: Well, and I imagine that understanding what those priorities are within the state and in your industry even more broadly, also requires some gazing into the crystal ball, or at least making some bets about the future of the healthcare industry and and how employers can play a role in addressing anticipated needs. Can you speak to that a little bit? I mean, how do you do that? Are you doing that? And what are you seeing in your crystal ball?

Rick Laferriere: That's the really interesting part of our jobs. Our team has to be equally focused, both internally and externally. Internally in that we need to work with our internal leaders to understand what their needs are for talent and what is coming down the road. We're a healthcare company, so obviously, things are changing almost daily in the healthcare space, in terms of healthcare delivery, in terms of the types of care or the types of services we can provide the community, things such as vaccinations or primary care that are that are coming a little bit closer to outlets like ours. That's a whole new frontier for us as a company, we've traditionally been in the healthcare space, had pharmacists and pharmacy technicians and, to some degree, nurses, and now we're looking at expanding into the primary care space and more broadly, into nursing. And we are serving, you know, the Medicare population, with Medical Assistants and with doctors and so all of these things are fascinating. They make our jobs very, very interesting, and we have to have some understanding of how folks get into those roles, get licensed or get the skills they need to do those jobs. And obviously, for doctors and pharmacists, it's years of schooling for pharmacy technicians or for medical assistants or, to some degree, nurses, that doesn't require that amount of schooling or professional certification. And so we tend to kind of look in those areas there, and we'll talk to our internal folks and say, what are the positions you're looking for now, where are we going with this down the road? So we can, as a team, get in front of our community stakeholders such as education and community colleges and adult ed and say this is what's coming. So if you build training for this, it will be job driven training. It will be training that leads to a real job that is coming now, that's coming down the road, that's, that's now, that's that that will, that will sustain long into the future. And of course, in the healthcare space, like that's everybody's questions all day. How is artificial intelligence gonna impact all of this? And I'm not sure we know yet. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very interesting, but it's out there. And so these are the conversations we have to have internally, which is, tell us your talent needs, tell us where you're seeing gaps. I'll give you another quick example. Actually, internally, some of the conversations we're having with our retail leaders is around pharmacists. They see down the road a shortage of pharmacists coming because young students in high schools are not going into pharmacy schools at the rate they were going into pharmacy schools 10 years ago. And so they're already sounding the alarm and asking us and our team to get involved at the high school level exposing students to pharmacy that can be something as simple as having some classes or curriculum on pharmacy or pharmacy technician, or giving students a work based learning opportunity while they're in school, but those are some of the nuances of our work, where you wouldn't think we're recruiting pharmacists as a team from the workforce system, but we do have a place in ensuring that We're helping to cultivate talent in some way, shape or form. So all of these conversations happening internally, big challenge for our team now externally, we've got to take everything we just learned from our partners internally and go externally and go, This is what we see coming. This is what's happening, and largely the workforce, system, community providers, they'll have a sense for that, but when they hear it from the employer, that validates that thinking, it really validates the hey as a workforce system, broadly, we've got to go down this path. We've got it. We've got to get more focused on health care. You know, certainly here in New England and in Massachusetts, where I am, you know, healthcare is a big focus, because we have large, you know, regional healthcare systems that are constantly in need of talent. So largely community partners and educators know that here, but they may not know, hey, medical assisting is going to be huge in three years. Hey, you know, we're going to have a need for pharmacy technicians, because they're going to be operating, they're going to be operating closer to the, what we call the top of their license, which is, they may be doing immunizations, which is not something pharmacy techs have traditionally done, but a certain, you know, state board of pharmacy allows it. Yeah, we're going to do that. We want to notify our partners of that, because what we do as a team has a long tail. It takes time. It takes time to build programming. It takes time to ensure that it's right, and then to sustain that programming. So we're not always an instant solution for our own company, but rather, we're a sustainable solution that that takes a while to get going and can sustain long into the future, which is better for us, better for the community, to ensure that they have a place to come to get training that's that's ultimately going to be, that's going to tie to a job.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So it's really helpful to hear you talk about how you go about this work. You know, there's so many, so many I guess. You know, evolving factors at play. There are a lot of details to consider, changing policies, changing funding streams, changing industry needs, the labor market. And it was interesting to hear you talk about, okay, well, how do you deal with a particular labor market shift or the need for one specific role in one community? I'm curious to go a little bit deeper there, and would love to hear you describe, you know, what does it look like to partner with a community organization and an educational institution to address these needs. I mean, coming at it from an employer perspective, I'm just, I would love to hear a little bit more about, like, what is it, you know, what is the nitty gritty of, how do you go about these partnerships? And, yeah, and how to make this work?

Rick Laferriere: Yeah. So Kaitlin, it's really for the employer standpoint, it's dedicating the time and the people to doing this. Largely, you know, over my years doing this, I've heard from a lot of community partners, a lot of government agencies, who've said to me, you know, that a competitor or someone else in this landscape came to them asking them to build a workforce solution. And they started with all the enthusiasm to do it. Showed up with a whole bunch of senior leaders at some meeting with you know, this community partner, and said, Hey, we want to do this. And they're like, sure, this sounds great. Let's do it. What happens after that is really, really critical, and largely, if you don't have enough resources dedicated to building a partnership that is more than transactional, but is relational. I like to say that, like you build a friendship. You know, almost because you're you're talking with these, these providers, these community partners, nonprofits, adult ed, education, whoever it is, they're very passionate about what they're doing, and if you're not, if you're not passionate, you don't have the time to do that, that's that's never going to be a fit. You're not going to figure anything out at that point. So, one of the pieces, I think that's really important, is that employers have to come to the table intentional and ready to provide resources and time and effort and energy into this . That's long past the transaction of sitting down and doing it. And so that's largely most employers don't have a team like ours or folks like ours who are dedicated, doing this work all day, every day. I don't have a generalist job. I don't have something different to do. I get to lean into workforce all day, every day, and the more employers who do that, the more they will see benefits for working in this space. So it really starts from the employer's perspective, with leaning in and being in and really staying in after that. You know, employers need to think about what tools they can provide in this conversation, to to a provider, to an educator, that they don't already have. And so, you know, a lot of times employers come to the table saying, you train them, and I'll take them, I've got the job, I'll do an interview, and I'll do all that sort of stuff, and that's nice, but there's more that can be done there. Employers can bring curriculum to the table. A lot of employers get very protective of their training. They, you know, it's proprietary. They don't want it to show up in the internet. They don't want to, you know, they don't want to show competitors what their training is. But you know, largely that's only hampering their efforts to train people, because if you're not willing to give your curriculum to to a trusted community partner so that they can train folks to come and work for you, give them exposure to to learning your careers, then, then you're already behind the eight ball. You're not, you're not, you're not providing that community partner with anything of value that could help them skill folks up for you and for your workforce. So for me, the number one piece is, come ready to share your training. Come ready to share something about your company, your culture, your application process, success stories, all of those pieces. It's not just as an employer, sit down and have the partner tell me what they can give to me. I need to come and say what I'm going to give to that partner too, and that's a big miss for employers. I'll show up with training curriculum, show up with the opportunity to provide work based learning experiences before the hire. We call them externships, or work based learning or unpaid internships, something that allows a student an immersion into what it's like to come to work for us, and those are tools that our team uses every single day to allow individuals the opportunity to experience what it's like to work at CVS. And that's great, because for some folks, they opt in and they're like, this is great. I do want to do this. I want to be a part of your company. And then for some it's like, this is not for me. Pharmacy is not for me. Healthcare is not for me. I'm gonna opt out, and that's a good both of those are good outcomes, because we we've helped someone identify what's right for them, and we've hopefully eliminated the possibility of turnover before it ever happens, which largely for our work, we want folks coming into our organization well prepared, understanding our culture, understanding what our jobs are like, so they can succeed and they can stay, and we provide a service to our internal partners of talent that's ready now and wants to stay. Those are a couple of tools in the tool belt. It's just so important for employers to understand the speed, the language, the environment of working in an education or workforce outfit, that it's hard. It doesn't operate the same way as a as big business does, and you've got to find a way to meet in the middle, and you've got to find a way to communicate talk the same language, and really develop that beyond relationship, but that friendship that will spur all kinds of new ideas and other growth that leads to creativity, customization, seeking additional funding that people say, hey, that's great. You're doing something awesome. I want to invest in that. We want to see more of that and also to have a benefit to the entire community and that industry. It's not just about us. This work isn't just about CVS Health. We love having people come work for us, but only 30% of people who come into one of our programs end up working for us. The other 70% don't, which means they likely go to work for someone else after the program that we've helped create, and that's fine with us. That's great. We actually do look at ourselves as a greater good function that's lifting up the community and workforce, and that's a source of pride for us.

Julian Alssid: I'd like to hear a little bit more about your results. And you know, how do you measure your success? And perhaps, you know, punctuate that with an example or two that you're really proud of.

Rick Laferriere: Yeah, this is, this is a really interesting conversation, Julian, and this has evolved a bit for us as a team in the last five years or so. So, you know, recognizing that we're working for one of the largest corporations in the country, and when you work for a, you know, publicly traded company, there's a lot of challenges that come with that you have to provide data for everything. Everything's got to have a return on investment. There's just a lot of hard and fast things that you need to show your value to the broader enterprise. That's a little tricky for what we do, because so much of what we do has more of a qualitative than a quantitative value associated with it. It's our team. You know, we've mentioned, we have 40 of us, and pretty much all of the 40 start with their heart and because we're working with communities, and we're working with individuals who look at us and go, I need you. I need the opportunity that you're offering and for various reasons, and that pulls right here for us and so, but in order for us to stay relevant and stay a part of this company, we've got to figure out measurements that show just exactly how impactful we are to the business. And so, you know, I mentioned the qualitative piece. We do success stories. We get so many wonderful thank yous from the community and from people who ultimately come working for us, or people who don't work for us. And those are great, and we'll share those all day with everybody, because it's such a big part of what we do, showing that we want to be a part of the greater good, and we really care. That's still an important part of what we do. But, but quantitatively, we've, we've begun honing on some metrics that at least have have given us a place to operate from with our leaders and and those metrics largely look like the number of participants in programs that we are we're actively partnered in and this year, we're on track to provide about 8000 people with experiences in a workforce program across the country. And that experience looks different everywhere, but that's the largest number of people we've provided a direct experience to in our team's history. So it's growing, which is great. And so we look at the number of participants that we put in programs. We look at the number of participants who completed those programs. We obviously want to see folks start and end a program, successfully complete it, and then, and then move on from there. And so we do look at the number of completers of our programs. We know people start, they stop for various reasons. We want to, want to measure that. We want to know why people opt out of a program. We want to make sure that we provide support, if it's you know, for a reason that you know may not be voluntary for that participant, but largely, you know, 95% of the folks who start a program with us complete it, which is great. That's, that's a, that's really great efficacy for us. So that's another measure I mentioned, that we, we measure the number of hires that come to work for us, and we, we, we aim at 30% we want 30% of those 8000 people to come and work for us, and largely, that's about where we sit, and we think that's a great value for us, because that's, that's, that's an entire group of people, roughly about, you know, 2000 people around there coming to work for us who may not have engaged with us before that, we've sort of introduced To the workforce, introduced a CVS that had an opportunity to grow and gain skills. And so we look at that conversion rate. We look at the number of hires that we have internally, although it's not necessarily a goal of ours, we do look at that. We're also looking at things such as the number of folks who come to us in a program that's not where. Where, where employment is not the intended outcome. So for example, you think about youth with disabilities. I'll give you an example there. Think about students who are transition youth, students who are towards the end of their school age, and 22ish or so who are still attending their their school system, but are about to age out. There's a large subset of students who need to figure out what's next once they age out of the school system. And we look at building programs for that population to immerse those students into the world of work through work experiences and work based learning or whatever it may be. And those students may not have employment as the immediate desired outcome, it may be down the road. We love working with programs like that, where we can be part of the steps towards employment for a particular population. And so now we're looking at measuring, hey, if we have a group of students that go through this, this programming we've built, and they weren't ready for work necessarily coming in, and that wasn't the intended goal of the program, but we're hoping that they're ready for work in a year, or even six months, or in some cases, two years, if we're a part of that journey, and then they come work for us in two years. That's an amazing story. And so now we're beginning to capture those individuals who come through our programs that don't have necessarily employment as an intended outcome, and seeing them come to work for us in two years after they've gotten all the experience and the confidence they need to work, and that's a tremendous success for us too. So we're looking at those data points as well. We're tracking the number of folks who come out of our career driven programs, the programs that are designed for hire, to be hired right now, and we're looking at the number of folks who go to work in the community for other employers as well. And we love that, that we think that's great, that you know, 60, 70% of the participants in one of our programs are going to work in another community setting. That's great, too. So those are some of the data points that we look at. It's not a perfect exact science. Nothing is in this space. We operate in the gray every day. So to get black and white is challenging, but those are some of the data points that we look at. Those are the data points that our senior leaders believe in, and believe in the value and what we do so well.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for sharing where you're going with the data right now. And it I mean you're, you know, so thorough, and to be it's this. This work is incredibly nuanced and certainly requires, as you said, right that mix of quantitative and qualitative data collection. And I really appreciate how you shared. You shared how you go about doing network effectively. I guess as we start to wind down our conversation today, Rick, you've provided so many, I think, very practical steps and takeaways and examples. But is there anything else you'd like to share about how our audience can become forces in supporting workforce development, especially from the employer perspective. And you know, and also, would love to hear how our listeners can continue to follow your efforts.

Rick Laferriere: For the employers out there who are interested in doing more here, who have not been terribly involved in workforce you know, I'd say this is an enormous opportunity to find talent at every level. And we've talked a bit about, you know, sort of the typical entry level points for our own organization, but there are entry points that are different in every every company out there, and not even that. It doesn't even have to be at entry level. It could be at a mid level position, you know, I would say to those employers as a call to action, come to the workforce space. Come to the workforce and education space, and learn what's happening around skilling members of your communities up towards careers with companies like you, and be a part of it. Be active. Get to know, you know that the larger workforce providers in your area, talk to them. Reach out, join a Workforce Board. Workforce boards are great places to network with other employers and with providers and also understand how workforce dollars flow and within the community you're in. From an employer perspective, it's just, it's get involved. Be curious. Build relationships, build alliances. Find people in your own organization who are champions in this space I mentioned earlier. It kind of takes a special person to do this work, particularly if you're in a big corporation. You've got a big heart, you want to help the community. You've got to balance it with I need to show my worth here. There's a way to do that. You can be very passionate and champion great causes for the community, while also showing those great results to your own senior leaders. You just have to be involved. You have to be passionate. These things are transactional. Make them relational. There's lots of touch points there. Your community college system. Your big adult ed providers. Go to, you know, go to your local one stop employment center and talk to the folks that are there. There's lots of ways to enter in and get curious and be there. So for employers get, you know, just get out there and see what workforce is all about. Because it's growing. It's building. It's a necessary part of all of our communities to ensure that the folks that are around us have the skills that they need to do the jobs that we're that we have today and now into the future. So certainly, for employers, I'd say, you know, get involved for the community and for those out there providing services, and for individuals interested in doing this we love doing this work. My team loves doing this work. We love being creative, and we love finding ways to support our communities and the individuals in our communities with workforce and educational programming, and it's really, you know, to some degree, it's, it's thinking creatively. You know, workforce can be creaky. It can be a little old. Workforce policies are a little old in spots. And, you know, a lot of folks kind of associate workforce with sort of like, you know, there's, there are layoffs, and there's, you know, you've got it, they're jumping in to help people who've been laid off. Or there's, you know, they used to, they used to help skill people up for, like, the factories and all of these sorts of things. And that's not workforce now, workforce is very, very different, thinking more progressively. And I really like that. And so for folks in the community, be be be ready to think creatively about how you can invite an employer into your your organization, or into your educational facility, and think creatively about how that you could, you know you could, you could leverage a really engaged employer into something you're doing to give people an opportunity. And so I think about it from those perspectives. You know, how can people learn more about our team? So interesting doing this work? I say a lot that we are a well kept secret, and that's not a good thing. And oftentimes we're a bit of our own enemy in this work, because we're very, very humble. We are not a look at me type of organization or group. We believe that we're doing good and that the spotlight should be on those who are benefiting from that, not our team, but those folks who are benefiting, who are becoming independent, supporting their families on the path to something like those are just those are, those are the things we think about. And so we're not self promoters. We don't do a good job with this, and our company doesn't do a great job helping us either with that. We're just too humble at times. But I tell people all the time, go open up your browser on your phone or on your computer and type in CVS Workforce Initiatives, lots of things will come up. A lot of the little stories that we have out there, you'll probably see little pieces about our workforce, innovation and talent centers. We call them WITCs. I mentioned I started in a Regional Learning Center in Boston. We renamed those regional learning centers as WITCs. So we've got more than 10 of those WITCs across the country now, and they are. They're really exciting. We do grand openings. A lot of wonderful things happen in those facilities, where we invite the community to work with us and enjoy them. You'll find everything out there with our community partners, you'll find a few things on our corporate website. There'll be some videos out there, some success stories. Um, that's the best way to figure out where to find us. And for those of you who ever want to connect with me or a member of my team for any reason, for any interest, do not hesitate to reach out to me anytime. I love hearing from people. I love talking with folks who are curious about our work. And so anytime please do reach out. I love hearing from folks.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much, Rick for taking this time to speak with us today. You're the energy and thoughtfulness and nuance, as Kaitlin said, and dynamism of your work and enterprise is palpable, you know, through the whatever this is ether. And we hope that we will help bring your very humble work a little bit more to the fore through this, this podcast and and that folks will follow up, as you've suggested, and search for CBS workforce development, and we certainly look forward to continuing to track your work as it unfolds. But thanks again, so much.

Rick Laferriere: Well, thank you, Julian, thank you, Kaitlin, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for the opportunity to join your podcast today and for getting to share a little bit about my team's work, and for your interest and your support and your partnership as well. It's been it's been wonderful, and look forward to many great successes in this space to come, indeed.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much, Rick. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. 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.

Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, discusses her approach to addressing the shortage of critical allied health workers — the 65% of the healthcare workforce including medical assistants, phlebotomists, and technicians. Drawing from her experience leading California's Community College system and founding Futuro Health in 2020, Ton-Quinlivan explains how her organization has trained over 10,000 adults through a debt-free model that integrates 40 education partners with data-driven coaching and wraparound support. The conversation examines broader lessons about adult learner success, including why live coaching proved more valuable than debt-free education in scholar testimonials, how essential skills curriculum with digital badges builds confidence for adults re-entering education, and why scaling such a model required building an ecosystem rather than becoming an accredited institution. Ton-Quinlivan emphasizes that workforce development requires staying the course with aligned money, metrics, and data to embed innovation into organizational DNA.

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 workforces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Welcome back. You know Julian, our conversations on the podcast and in our consulting work are often about tackling workforce development challenges at scale. It's challenging just to design and implement effective workforce development initiatives, let alone scale them.

Julian Alssid: Absolutely Kaitlin, inevitably, these initiatives require collaboration and commitment from employers, educators, public sector leaders, community partners, and learners alike. Needless to say, this is a tall order to pull off in a single community or region, and exponentially more complex when we talk about working across regions.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And our guest today has a unique perspective on how to go about making this complex work happen with a career that spans the private, public and nonprofit sectors. She's gone from leading a massive higher education system to founding a nimble, innovative startup in 2020 that has since trained and supported over 10,000 adults across the US as they completed credentials and qualifications for Allied Health careers. Her work is a powerful example of how to effectively prepare untapped talent for career success.

Julian Alssid: Our guest is the legendary Van Ton-Quinlivan, chief executive officer of Futuro Health. I joke. I've known Van for many years, and she really has been a true standout in the field. And she's a nationally recognized leader in workforce development. She was formerly executive chancellor of the California Community Colleges and currently serves as an appointee to the California Health Workforce Education and Training Council. She's the author of Workforce RX and host of a podcast by the same name, promoting agile, multicultural solutions for employers, educators, and workers. Van has been named one of the top 50 women leaders in healthcare, and she holds an MBA and a master's in education policy from Stanford University. We are so excited to have you on the podcast, Van, and thanks so much for joining us.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: Oh, I'm so delighted to be here, Julian and Kaitlin, to be amongst leaders who are also thinking and trying to solve big problems in the area of education and workforce development.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We really appreciate you joining us for this conversation today, and look forward to kicking it off with hearing a little bit more about your background and what led you to your current work. Julian gave a bit of a bio there, but would love to hear more from you.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: You know my expertise in workforce development. I got my chops doing it in the private sector with a company of 20,000 men and women, where I brought them from having no opinion in workforce development to being an industry recognized national, national best practice. And then I went into the higher education system with the California Community College driving the workforce mission where, you know, I started in sort of the worst of days where we had about 100 million made available for career technical education program, and by the time that I serve, finished my two terms, it went from 100 million to 200 million, to 700 million to over a billion dollars. And so faced a big quandary when, when I was approached by Kaiser Permanente and its partners after stepping off from the community colleges, they said, geez, for two years, we've been wrestling with how to grow the next generation of allied health workers. And allied refers to the 65% of the healthcare workforce that we know we all need those volumes in our backyard. So you know, they're the emergency medical technicians that come when we have an accident, the medical assistant that checks you in, or the x-ray tech or the lab tech. So a lot of the technicians that are trained through credentials and less than a four year degree, they are the allied health workers. And right now you know, 75% of healthcare facilities report that they have workforce pains in this area. So when Kaiser Permanente and their partners approached me, I had to look in the mirror and really just reflect on the level of risk and how scary it is to go from running a billion dollar system to now going into a startup environment, and what if it didn't work. I think we all have these qualities when we make big career decisions. Fortunately, I had friends that reminded me of my early days, which was that, you know, I'm first generation who came from Vietnam through the war and education opportunity was made available to me, and I feel very grateful for that, and and I do feel the the role that I had with the community colleges was a pay it forward role where, and this role is also paying for the opportunity that I had to others. And so with that realization, I was able to overcome my own internal self doubt, and said, you know, really, for many of us who are on the innovation side, it's like, if it's not us, then then who? And so I'm glad to be bringing a lot of the best practices learned from the private sector, the public sector and into the nonprofit sector infant or health, to see which combinations of best practices can really get the untapped adult learners to be able to get their credentials and qualifications for that first or next healthcare career.

Julian Alssid: So looking at the untapped adult worker population and allied health careers, can you speak a little more to the problems that you're seeking to solve related to that population? And really, how does the Futuro Health model work.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: Right now the labor market is having its adjustments with all the federal cuts. So I'm going to put that aside for the moment, because the macro, the macro context. The bigger problem is that we have an aging nation. And when you go over age 65 for example, all of us will consume more health care, which means that you're going to need more caregivers, right? And roughly, you know, 30, 40ish years ago, there were 12 working adults available for every one person over age of 65, Today it's roughly seven. And in about, you know, a little over a decade from now, it's going to be 4. So we have a shrinking adult population that is available to get in to compete for all the roles, much less the roles that are in care. So that is sort of the macro trend, and why we should be thinking about this space as well as other spaces. Now, when it comes to the individual adults themselves. You may be wondering, well, what's the problem for them? I mean, given this big need, well, we did four focus groups, including one that was in all Spanish, to learn what were the difficulties. And of course, you know, the first thing that came up was, of course, the theme of flexibility in the delivery, right? The second was, aside from cost, is the navigation, the navigation. So even if you knew you wanted to become a medical assistant, the path to go from here to there was not obvious. And so the noisiest of the options tended to be your private, proprietary option, which then led to the problem of three, which is even for those in the focus group who made it into healthcare careers at these entry level steps, they were so laden by debt, they were just stuck at the bottom rung. So we had considered all of that in the mix in order to create a path to getting credentials and qualification. Because you know, both of you know that healthcare is one industry that if you don't even have the qualifications, you can't even get the interview, right. It's highly credentialed compared to other industries. So that was sort of a good problem space to figure out how to apply the best practices of workforce development and see if we can design a way that could work for adults, or to be able to transition adults into the qualification and credentials they needed.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I'm just curious to learn a little bit more. It seems like you have a heavily networked approach in this work. How do you go about building out this model with your many partners?

Van Ton-Quinlivan: Workforce development is a team sport, not an individual sport. So it's like, how do you wrap the ecosystem into and fold the ecosystem in a way that, you know, everybody can do what they do best? So when we initially started, you know, many of the healthcare employers, of course, this sort of happened right at the beginning of the pandemic, their impression was, nobody wants to get into healthcare, right? People were not interested in healthcare, so we activated a set of partners and provided them tools that were heavily tied into the data science, our data science acumen to go out and scout and recruit, to take advantage of healthcare workers, to scout and recruit communities, friends and family networks. And it turned out that it was absolutely a myth that people were not interested in healthcare roles. They were interested, they just couldn't figure out how to navigate through. And so we even during the pandemic, when enrollment was declining, I know at the California Community Colleges, it was as severe as like, 20% decline in enrollment. Year upon year, we were able to hit all of our enrollment numbers to bring adults back in. So, you know, it's the gal who is the security guard in the hospital. She's one of our Scholars. So she became a Futuro Health Scholar after taking care of her mother, who had cancer, and coming to the realization that she potentially could be a caregiver and like to be in service of others. And then she found a Futuro Health flier, and we were able to get her phlebotomist credential. I know she moved from security guard into a role that was in caregiving. It's really how do you break into healthcare when you're sitting on the sidelines.

Julian Alssid: Putting on your pre Futuro Health hat for a moment when you were dealing with the all the workforce development of the system, interested to hear what you're learning through the development and growth of Futuro Health that can be applied across industries. We were starting with some big numbers. So for example, in California alone, the need was for 500,000 more allied health workers. To begin looking at that, it's a design problem. We had the option with the capital we were given by the health system, we had the option of becoming an accredited institution ourselves. But we said, My goodness, how are we going to solve a 500,000 person problem by growing cohorts of 25, 25, 25, 25 right? I mean, it's a scaled dilemma. So we changed the way we looked at and I said, Well, how do we begin designing at 1000, 2000, 3000 and a time in order to begin tackling this dilemma? And so our approach Julian was, let's build the ecosystem of education partners, and now we have roughly 40 education partners whom we integrate into the student experience. And so our data science tells us, and our coaching tells us what is the best match in terms of which institution, which program, is mapped to the learner. The key, though, this is the key. The key is whether the education institution has the data exchange capability with us, because most of our partners, education partners, exchange data with us on a daily basis, right? So we know, we know where the scholar is, where we needed to intervene. And because we're shepherding their entire journey, and thanks to sponsorships from employers and state agencies, you know, they're coming out debt free as a result of going through this journey. So it's really important for us to not only provide the wraparound that is the live touch throughout their entire journey, but there's the technical education program, of course, vetted, curated based on industry demand. So we have 40 education providers. And everywhere we expand, we source, and vet and integrate new education providers. And then the last part, which is really interesting, is how we have leveraged an essential skills slash soft skill curriculum as the way to effectively onboard adults. And this is interesting itself. We had tried onboarding adults, because before we unlocked the full scholarship, which is fairly expensive to us, could they take two academic courses, like anatomy or physiology, for example. It turns out that that didn't actually predict their success so much as they're confident, building their confidence to re enter education. And so that's, that's one area we're super proud that we unlocked some some experimentation and it has worked.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So building on that last example, actually, Van, I'm curious taking a step back on this. I mean you're drawing from many years in this field, and many experiences across public, private sector, given what we're seeing, you know, with respect to economic shifts and technological shifts, and you know, thinking about how we best support learning for adults, what do you believe? Or what are you seeing in some of the best practices around how we support learning in this in the context of a skills based economy where there's just so much shift and change happening.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: I know you've had speakers talk about the skills based economy and the importance of credentials, and I'm just going to translate it to what we have experienced with our Futuro Health Scholars. And these are 1000s and 1000s of them, right? And what's so interesting is, even though they have gone through the Futuro Health experience debt free, they never talk about, oh, thank you, thank you so much for for you know, the that we came through debt free, they actually talk about those moments when they were going to stop, those moments they were going to quit, those moments that were really hard, and it was the live coaching that carried them through those moments of hardship. So when it comes to the question, for example, should AI replace coaching? We have so far decided that our population that we're working with, and it's 90% culturally diverse, with about roughly 50% linguistic diversity, very important for healthcare, because it begets trust. We have decided that the live coaching that is essential for the learners right now, so the AI, your applications of AI, improvement on the data can all be on the back end, but that is what the Scholars have valued way more than other things that we thought would be more important. The other thing Kaitlin that we saw was, you know, we have this unique curriculum called Human Touch Healthcare, which is focused. I mentioned that focus on the essential skills and soft skills, and they're all instructed by seasoned healthcare workers who can put it into context. And as they finish each of those modules, you know, they earn a badge, a digital badge, and the pride in which these adults take in being able to post these badges and have the acknowledgement it may be that the positive reinforcement is very critical to building the confidence of many adults who are sitting on the sidelines of learning right now. So I think in the broader context, as we think about the shrinking K 12, and where do we find and how do we tap into adults that maybe not participating or we need to upskill them, the success coaching, making the journey simpler, of course, figuring out the costs, but also, like, how do you, how do you continue to have the positive reinforcement throughout? I mean, these, these are not, these are not things that have been sufficiently designed into traditional education systems, but it helps us all.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely right? Those interim milestones of success, right, that don't just come when you finish the course, but like those moments along the way that provide that continual what you're saying, positive reinforcement and the acknowledgement, like, yes, you have done this, keep going.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: I can is really important. I mean, most of us waited until the earning of our degree in order to get that reinforcement, but right? I think when we're dealing with these, the non-traditional learners that are now becoming more standard, we just have to rethink how we structure their experience.

Julian Alssid: Well, and you're sort of leading right into what I was thinking, which is, as we watch this world unfold economically and demographically, and in terms of education, and what that means, and the choices folks are making about how to advance their education and careers, what do you see as the as the biggest challenges, both in healthcare and even beyond, for the, you know, for the people who are this band of partners that are coming together to try to, you know, advance, help people advance their careers and grow the economy.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: You know Julian, I wonder if you see that we're going to need to be more fluid with our education processes and systems because of how many different ways people are tapping into education, and yet we want them. We know that, Jeff Strohl over there, just issued a report called Falling Behind: How Skills Shortages Threaten Future Jobs, and he says that there's going to be a need to add additional 5.25 million workers with post secondary credentials, of which 4.5 million is a bachelors and above, and this is during the time period of 2024 to 2032. The bachelor's and above is getting very, very expensive these days, right? And then there's a lot of skepticism. So how we get people to partake in the education process and how to convert it over to the degree pathway, is super important. So you know, the prior learning credit, all the transcripting that your guests are talking about. The hard barriers between education and who provides it is likely going to soften over the future.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, and yeah, you said, it also makes me think about even, like, the technical systems behind how this happens, right? Like, how do we make sure that we have the back end software and ability to say, Okay? Like, how do we make this credential portable? How do we know that we know what it means here will mean the same thing somewhere else, right? I mean, there's just so much at play there around making, I guess, the translation of these credentials clearer, especially as people want to, you know, either stack credentials into a bachelor's degree or transfer credits into a bachelor's degree. So much work needed in that space.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: Talking about scale, right, back when I was with the California Community College Chancellor's Office, is the question of, do you all your grantees? Are they all on Excel spreadsheets, right? And so what we did was we said, Okay, we're going to provide common systems and then for workforce outcomes, instead of having the grantees and the faculty and the administrators spend all all their time trying to hunt and pack and trying to find outcomes data. So we begin to automate some of those processes so that they're not talking about, where's the data they're talking about, ooh, what does the data say? So I think that will continue to be a long journey for us to evolve, especially big systems.

Julian Alssid: I'm wondering then, given your experience in and now, with working with many different systems and providers, are you seeing more of a flexibility? Is it beginning to happen? I mean, are systems adapting to more than they have in the past? I mean, this has been a story we've had, you know, discussed, we've all talked about again and again, and it's, it's hard for systems to change, but, you know, it's going to have to happen one way or another, is kind of what I hear. So the question is, is it? Is it happening?

Van Ton-Quinlivan: Oh, I think you probably have seen more examples of organ rejections than you've seen examples of organ ingestion, right? Maybe that's a bad analogy, but I think it brings up the question of, how do you introduce change, like, how do you have big systems try out and experiment things? And so I remember a day when digital badges. Do you remember the early days of digital badges, and everybody thought, you are just crazy to even think about what, what a concept. So I remember redoing a grant, existing funds, redoing a grant, and saying, Whoever wins this grant, you will be also experimenting with digital badges and this grant, the winner has to involve at least 10 colleges. And the reason why is that, when you design a solution for 10 colleges, it can't be just fine tuned for just your one college. It's thinking about scale. And so that was an example where it was originated in one grant with 10 colleges, and then the next grant was about getting it to 20 colleges, and then it went to about 60. By the time I left, it was like 80 something colleges had adopted the same trial and error, and it's now many, many moons later, it's sort of part of the DNA of a system and how students progress and how they see I think you've heard of the Career Mapper, and it's been integrated to multiple tiers of higher education, not just one. So I think as we think about all the different technologies, a big question in change management, it's how do we begin to seed some experimentation so that a system can become familiar, and then that adoption widens.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I think you were going in this direction very naturally in this conversation. But Bon we always like to add, given that the podcast is called Work Forces, we always like to ask about how our listeners can be forces. And so as we start to wind out our conversation today, what practical steps can our audience take to become forces in supporting learners and employers alike at this increasingly complex moment and intersection of work and learning?

Van Ton-Quinlivan: The biggest lesson I've learned throughout my various careers is that intentionality really matters. Right? It matters, because there are so many parties that need to come to the table in order to make a workforce program successful. There's intentionality such that any funding that you have doesn't manifest just as a one time thing. But there is sort of an echoing and ongoing learning that's incorporated back into the DNA of the organization. So, you know, I used to say that it's not just about money coming through, but it's monies, metrics, and data, they all have to be aligned for the behavior of our institutions to be where we want them to be, and that requires us to stay the course. So I know you have a big audience of higher education and workforce practitioners and leaders out there who are doing really important things. And so I just encourage folks, as they're introducing innovation, to stay the course. Because it does take time, and it does take staying the course in order for an innovation to have traction.

Julian Alssid: Very sage advice, and sounds like you know you're proving the very, the very notion. As we wind this down, we'd like to ask our guests: How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Van Ton-Quinlivan: I would invite them to come to our website, which is futurohealth.org and subscribe to our newsletter. And you know, we were, last year, we were featured at the World Health Organization. I just came back from the G7 Canada, where we shared some of our best practices. And what are the implications for growing for example, the problem gambling, workforce, mental and mental and behavioral health. So there's a lot of good things that we're doing because we have the sort of the platform to be able to experiment, which could be harder in other environments. So welcome others to learn along with us, but also share ideas with us.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great well. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us today and for allowing us to learn along with you in this conversation. And really appreciate you taking the time to meet with us today. It's a great pleasure.

Van Ton-Quinlivan: Kaitlin and Julian, thank you.

Julian Alssid: Thank you so much Van.

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 dot info, forward, slash podcast. You can also find workforces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcast. 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.

Audrey Patenaude, CEO of RippleMatch, discusses the rapidly evolving landscape of early career recruiting in the age of AI and how the RippleMatch recruitment automation platform is transforming the hiring process for both employers and emerging talent. Drawing from her background scaling AI companies, Patenaude explores the challenging reality documented in recent research: fewer entry-level roles are available due to AI automation, while demand rises for "entry plus" candidates with verified AI fluency and strong power skills like critical thinking, adaptability, and communication. She explains how RippleMatch addresses the application overload problem—where candidates submit over 300 applications to land one role—by using skills-based matching to connect qualified candidates with employers, saving hiring teams 70% of resume review time while giving candidates a 20x better chance of getting interviews. The conversation delves into practical strategies for recent graduates to build portfolios of AI projects and document real-world experience, and for employers to create "AI centers of excellence" within their recruiting teams. Patenaude also discusses the shifting definition of entry-level work, the rising importance of interview readiness and communication skills, and why career preparation increasingly needs to begin in middle school to help students navigate this new paradigm where AI skills are becoming as fundamental as internet literacy.

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 the 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. At the intersection of work and learning right now, there's a confluence of challenges for employers and employees alike at all stages of the application and hiring process. In particular, we're seeing an increasing impact on early career professionals, as documented in the recent Burning Glass Institute report, "No Country for New Grads", and the "Stanford Digital Economy Lab paper, "Canaries in the Coal Mine: Six Facts About the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence". There are fewer jobs available for early career graduates due to the impact of generative AI, which can accomplish many of the job activities previously done by early career professionals.

Julian Alssid: Absolutely Kaitlin. And alongside this complexity, AI has also shifted how prospective employees look for and apply for new roles, and how companies go about recruiting and hiring talent. Just last season, we talked with Sean VanDerziel, President and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, about how employers are using AI for screening resumes, but also how the use of AI by job seekers to generate thousands of resumes is leading some employers to return to in-campus recruiting to find, you know, quote, legitimate candidates.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And then there's also the impact of AI on the very tech platforms and tools that HR talent development and career services teams use to support their own recruitment and hiring efforts. Needless to say, we're facing a complex set of circumstances, and it seems like just the right moment to speak with someone working on this set of challenges every day.

Julian Alssid: Which brings us to today's guest, Audrey Patenaude is the CEO of RippleMatch, a recruitment automation platform that seeks to transform how emerging talent connects with opportunity in the age of AI before joining RippleMatch, Audrey spent much of her career in the AI space and helped teams scale through rapid growth and innovation. At RippleMatch, she's focused on building a platform that levels the playing field for candidates while helping employers discover and hire the next generation of AI skilled leaders. Welcome to Work Forces. Audrey.

Audrey Patenaude: Yes, thank you. Julian Kaitlin, thank you for having me today. Excited to be here.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We're excited to have you with us, Audrey. So, as we kick off today, can you please tell us a bit more about your background and what led you to your role at RippleMatch?

Audrey Patenaude: I'll start with a little bit about my journey and why I really connected to RippleMatch's vision. I'm originally from Quebec City, a very charming but very cold part of Canada. And over there, I studied business and marketing in college, but when I got out of school, there were not a lot of marketing jobs in Quebec City, especially this was before remote work, and there were not a lot of tech companies with offices over there. So after college, I had to work some marketing jobs for small local companies for a while, until this one job opened at an AI company that had offices both in Canada and the US. And I remember at the time, all my friends whom I graduated from college with were all fighting for this one exciting job that we had in our, you know, in our backyard, and I got lucky enough to get it, and I think that this gave me some perspective on how the right opportunity can really change the course of your life, if you're lucky enough to, you know, be at the right place, at The right time and get noticed. So years later, I moved to New York, and that AI company grew a lot, and we went through an IPO, and I got very lucky along the way to be supported by amazing leaders and mentors and learn in that fast growing environment with a lot of innovation, and then got the chance to move to the city that I love and now consider home. So when came time for my next chapter, I met with the team at RippleMatch, and I immediately saw how, you know, to me, this platform felt like a way to push some of that luck forward, to help other candidates like me land jobs that could change their lives and open up so many doors for them, so it's really a motivating mission for me to work on every day and get to see the real life impact of it for candidates in the world and employers alike.

Julian Alssid: Audrey, speak to us a bit about what are the problems that RippleMatch is trying to solve for those employers and candidates and universities alike.

Audrey Patenaude: You touched on it a little bit earlier. But RippleMatch is the marketplace for AI, skilled emerging talent. What that means, or where that talent is, is folks early in their career that know how to leverage AI across all types of roles, and that can be really these amazing contributors that make a huge difference inside companies, and part of the reason why is because Gen Z is leading the use of AI, especially bringing their own tools to school and and work. So the problem that we are solving for employers right now we're seeing employers starting to think very differently about hiring and team design with AI, they are thinking a lot about how to design their teams in a way that will leverage AI intelligence with human intelligence working alongside each other, and what is the best way to build a team that's going to be efficient with the best tools and skills set up, and that's across, you know, go to market teams and technical teams. And in that design of the new, you know, modern team across different function, entry level is no longer seen as a training ground where employers on board a lot of super junior green talent and give them very easy but laborious tasks as they learn the ropes of the job, because, as you mentioned before, now, tasks like data entry, data enrichment and cleaning, or very basic support tickets can be or are being automated by AI. So we're seeing that instead of junior specialists, employers are looking for AI enabled generalists, for example, years ago or recently, if you were going to hire a junior marketer, you would very often look for a profile of a junior professional with very deep expertise or specialization in one part of marketing. So for example, you're looking for a HubSpot expert. Now that profile is changing to looking for someone that has amazing power skills, so someone who's really resourceful, has critical thinking, is going to be very adaptable and very collaborative and with AI and being able to leverage AI tools that deep specialization in one tool is not as critical or as valuable anymore, because you can use AI to figure things out, to build workflows amongst multiple tools, and you're going to innovate much faster and be able to contribute a lot more than that previous profile of a very kind of niche set of expertise. So yeah, employers are looking for these candidates with AI skills who can contribute and innovate quickly, and at the same time, power skills are becoming even more important because AI is automating some of these hard skills. So the net here for employers, and where the challenge comes is that the bar for entry level talent is rising, but at the same time, inbound volume and noise is up more than ever with AI, as you were saying, allowing candidates to send out a lot of resumes or to use ChatGPT to produce a cover letter or resume. The challenge that we help with is helping employers find top talent that's ready for today's workforce by connecting them with candidates that have verified AI skills, power skills, and technical skills. So basically getting them straight to the right talent with the right assessed skills, so that they can spend more time reviewing and interviewing and qualifying these top candidates.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So what does it look like to do that? Because, like you said, this is such a complex moment where employers are inundated with applications like, how does your platform work to help verify the skills that job seekers have?

Audrey Patenaude: The way it works is that we replace that application overload and traditional resumes that you would get on a traditional job board with skills-based matching so employers enter the criteria that they're looking for in terms of not just background in education, but also the skills that they want for this role, in terms of AI skills and AI fluency, but also power skills and technical skills, and they get matched with candidates who have verified these skills through courses and assessments. So we know that they know how to use these tools, that they are good communicators, because they've taken these assessments that they can showcase on their profile, and they apply to the jobs that they are qualified for through our platform, which is really for them, a guided experience to find their path in this market and to build and showcase the skills that will get them hired. So it's a little bit like the dating app that you need to find the job in this AI-disrupted market that just cuts out all of the noise on both sides.

Julian Alssid: Given that then, as we kind of move to this more skills focused marketplace, how, what are some of the successes, and then, what are some of the challenges that you're, you know, you're experiencing with both, again, both the employers and we're interested also in from the employee side as well.

Audrey Patenaude: Obviously, it's a tough market for students. AI is automating entry level work, as you touched on, and I think there's generally a more conservative and cautious ethos around hiring in most industries. So it's a bit of an overwhelming job market for them, where the major that you studied in may not perfectly translate into the kind of jobs that will be available to them today and tomorrow, and with all that uncertainty, the reflex is obviously to send out as many job applications as possible, and our latest survey data shows that candidates were submitting over 300 applications on traditional job platforms in order to land one role. So that's obviously a lot of work and overwhelming for candidates, but also for employers. So what we're doing is really helping them build that skills and personality profile, when they can really showcase what they can do and who they are, instead of being one more resume in a sea of thousands and thousands.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And how about on the employer side? What are some of the successes and challenges you're seeing there, as you know, build out this platform?

Audrey Patenaude: For employers, I think one of the challenges is on leveraging AI in their own internal workflow can sometimes be a bit of a challenge depending on the industry or the size of the company. You know, in our case, AI doesn't impact matching or decision making from employers on on candidates, so it's never an issue when teams actually look into but it's something where just the word AI can sometimes make some IT teams a little nervous, or it can make also recruiters or TA professional nervous in terms of how much is it going to change my work? Do I want it to change? And we really encourage recruiters to see AI as a co-pilot that helps them to do more of that busy work that can just be sped up and automated, but that they are in the driver's seat and they are making the decision it's just allowing them to spend more quality time with the best candidates. But in terms of successes, it's been really amazing to see how transformative this better way of connecting employers and candidates can be on both sides, because, as I was saying, our you know, matching connects only qualified matches on both sides together. We're able to save our employer partners around 70% of the time that we didn't normally spend on resume review, because there's none of the you know, unqualified noise coming in. It's only basically a pipeline of qualified candidates. So that's been pretty transformative, especially in today's market where ta teams are slimmer, there's less budget, there's less resources. So that time saving has been really, really huge, and for candidates, we're giving them a 20 times better chance of getting an interview than if they were to submit an application on traditional job boards, which is also really encouraging and much better for them. It's really great to hear from candidates who write to us after they got a job to thank us for how transformative this was for them in the job search, and how reassuring it was to finally hear back from companies instead of being ghosted.

Julian Alssid: Well, it's, it's so interesting though, Audrey, because you're, you're sort of helping then to cut down on the noise and improve efficiency in this process. And but if what you said earlier rings true and is an ongoing pattern this, and we've been seeing this for years, although with AI now, the acceleration is just massive. Is the rising skill demand for entry level? And I'm almost wondering, like, is there going to be an entry level anymore? Like, what is, you know? Is there really, you know? So you're making this more efficient. You're helping employers, in a way, hire fewer people, but with much more precision. Is this a blip, or is this, you know, where? Where do you see this coming? A little prognosticating.

Audrey Patenaude: To what I was saying earlier. I think that the profile of what it means to be entry level talent and the demand for it is going to change. We're calling this new type of entry level roles, entry plus, where you're not, you know, expected to come in, and, as I said, like, take a long time to ramp and contribute, because you have to learn very basic skills or do your junior work for a while. You're expected to come in, and, you know, be able to use AI to ramp up really fast, and to start innovating really fast, and to learn new tools really fast. So I think that we're looking at a profile where there may be a little less roles in some industries, but that these contributors make meaningful impact really quickly, and that with the folks that will be able to use AI the best, it's going to be pretty competitive for that talent. And we're already seeing some headlines about the salaries going up for this kind of young talent. That's really AI savvy. So I do think that there's going to be a revived demand for entry level with these right AI skills, and it's also going to be potentially pretty lucrative roles for these candidates too.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, yeah, it makes me wonder too. This is kind of transitioning a little bit to the higher ed side, but I'm just curious. Like, what do you see that meaning for, like, your higher ed partners right around like, what does this mean for we're talking about the skill needs going up. So what does it mean for career services professionals and those helping rising college graduates with this process of not only finding a job but also building that skill set that you're talking about to be entry plus.

Audrey Patenaude: Of course, universities and career services are, you know, working as best as they can to get their students to be job ready and market ready. I think the challenge is that what it means today is evolving very, very fast. It had already been transforming after COVID with the rise of remote work, the way that candidates would connect with opportunity was already a little bit different. It was already getting harder. I think now it is accelerating and getting even harder, because that skill bar is rising and is also changing really quickly. So we see a lot of university partners coming to us to help bridge that gap in the job search, whether for an internship or for a first job out of school, to help alleviate some of the stress and how overwhelming the job search process can be, and the guide directing them to a place where they can receive matches that they are qualified for, which gives them a higher level of confidence when they apply to these roles, that they are a right fit for them, and that they will have a higher odd of getting an interview, but then also identifying the skills that they might want to build, learn, and showcase in order to increase their odds of landing a job. So for example, it may be good for me to take a class in prompt engineering online and be able to showcase to employers that I've taken that but it's also some things as simple as interview readiness. Interview readiness is a big challenge that we hear from a lot of our partners, even before you know the rise of AI and even before the bar got higher on the skills, on the technical skill side, just knowing which candidates is ready for an interview and will have the right communication skill to succeed and to succeed in your interview process was already a big challenge. So that's both kinds of learning journeys that we want to help provide candidates to build these skills and then showcase them, and then, you know, be able to translate that into recruiter sourcing. So yeah, we have universities coming to us and just basically wanting to get us in front of their students to help ease that job search process right after they graduate.

Julian Alssid: Well, and we've had numerous discussions at this point about how this process is being pushed down to younger and younger and younger students. Just thinking back to last season, Jean Eddy from American Student Assistance, talked with us about middle school is where it really has to all begin. It's too late, if it's later than that, and I'm guess, I'm wondering is it, is it too early to say or from where you sit, are you seeing that this greater emphasis on building work experience, building those skills, building the interview and other communication skills earlier is paying dividends for candidates.

Audrey Patenaude: We're seeing increased investments from our employer partners in earlier and earlier programs in terms of early ID and early kind of enablement and education. So it is starting to go earlier and earlier in that education journey, in part, to help build these skills that now employers have to build with candidates when they start their first job. In terms of what does it mean to be a good employee? What does it mean to show up on time and use email properly. All of these skills are being now a little bit put on the burden of the teams that onboard that early career talent. So with that investment of getting early ID programs earlier and internships earlier, it just helps front load some of that learning and also groom these candidates to be, you know, ready and bigger contributors when they joined the company a few years later. So we're seeing that investment come in earlier. Of course, it's not fixing the entire problem, and that's where I think some of that digital learning and proactively recommending what's the best class for you to take, depending on where you are in your career journey or the career path that you want to take is where it can be pretty powerful. Because I think what we're hearing from candidates right now is that it's pretty overwhelming to even know where to go or what to do to make yourself better already, because there is a lot of digital content. There are a lot of digital classes, and you can ask ChatGPT what to do. But what advice do you actually take, and where do you actually go to to, you know, get yourself ready for the workplace is pretty overwhelming, because they definitely feel it shifting. They know it's changing, and they want to make sure that they find their way through this new chaos.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, I'm sure it shifts a bit by industry too, right? Depending on where these job seekers are looking, like what occupations and industries are looking to work, then the upskilling needs pre employment might be slightly different, right? I mean, I would assume some jobs, based on what we've been reading, some of the jobs are, there are fewer of some jobs than others, I guess, as related to which are being more impacted by automation and AI.

Audrey Patenaude: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're seeing the headlines about having less computer science roles available. I think that in some industries or in some segments, they're less available. So coding is an example, but also, if you're an amazing coder, and you know how to use AI really well, instead of being, you know, 10x the impact of a normal coder, then you're going to be maybe, like, 50x or 100x so your value is also rising on the market. So I think it's interesting dynamics. I think where we're seeing, where we're seeing it change the most recently, or I guess the fastest, is also in the other kind of go to market functions, where AI was not really thought of as a big plus until really recently. If you're a business development person or a salesperson, I don't think you were considered as an AI talent up until just a few months ago. But now we're looking at partners wanting to make sure that the PR that they hire, or the marketer or the salesperson will have the right proficiency in the right tools, or will just be, you know, able to leverage LLMs to figure things out and be a lot more efficient at their at their jobs. So I don't think that the impact in terms of like number of roles is even across industries, to your point, but I think the impact on the profile that folks are looking for is starting to spread across all industries and job functions.

Julian Alssid: That is so interesting, given all of that Audrey then, pulling on your own experience, what practical steps can our audience take to become forces in navigating or helping recent graduates navigate this complex job landscape?

Audrey Patenaude: For recent graduates or young professionals, I would say, as much as you can build real world experience with AI, regardless of what your major was, or the type of path that you may want to pursue. Build a portfolio of these projects or these outcomes and document them. You can use ChatGPT to recommend tools or experiments that you can do, or different projects that you can build based on the type of career you're targeting, but really make sure that you're documenting those, building a portfolio of those, because more and more employers will want to see tangible examples of the type of AI work that you've done and how you were able to innovate and get creative with it. Because some skills like I can use ChatGPT will become, you know, commoditized and a no brainer. And it's almost like, yes, I can use the internet, right? Very, very fast. So how will you be able to differentiate your work and you know, and really show that you can bring more value? But I would also say, focus on developing your power skills. That's something we're hearing more and more from employers that with AI skills like communication, both verbal but also how you interact with recruiters by email are becoming more critical than ever. They're really looking for these strong players that will make an impact on their team long term, not just because of their AI skill, but because of their critical thinking and because of their collaboration skills and how much they'll be able to move, you know, across their function and across the company. And then for employers, I think the practical recommendation here is really creating those AI centers of excellence within their own teams, to really empower, you know, their recruiting team, their TA team, to innovate in the ways that they find and connect with the right talent. So we have, for example, take the biggest AI adopters on your recruiting team and have them be evangelists and showcase to others how they are embedding AI in their workflows to demystify some of it, but also inspire others to also dive in and use AI and when you're looking to adopt new AI tools, or to ask your CFO or your procurement team for new AI tools, really set expectations in terms of, what are you going to use this tool for? What are going to be the practical implications of it? And then what ROI do you think you're going to get from that in a realistic way, both for the impact on the recruitment team in terms of this is going to help save my team 70% of the time that we're spending on reviewing resume, that is that many amount of hours, and that's what we're going to be able to do better with these other these hours instead. Or what's the amount of money that we're going to be able to save, but not just tactically on the impacts on the recruiting team, but also frame it in terms of the impact on the business. That means, for example, we'll be able to hire talent that will convert to better talent or interns that will be able to convert into full time hires at a higher rate, because we'll have identified the best talent, folks that will get promoted and contribute more into the company. So also some of the qualitative aspects of the outcome that will resonate with business needs on top of, you know, recruiting KPIs.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Great, well, so many practical steps to take away. Really appreciate that. And so as we wind down our conversation today, Audrey, How could our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work at RippleMatch?

Audrey Patenaude: Yeah, we publish a lot of content on how recruiting is evolving in this market, and practical tips to adapt for both candidates and employers. We love to interview our own customer partners regularly to hear about their real life stories about how their teams are innovating and driving change internally in their hiring process. So you can follow RippleMatch on LinkedIn and myself to continue to get these insights on your feed regularly.

Julian Alssid: Thank you so much, Audrey for taking the time to speak with us today, and we will certainly keep following you and look forward to watching this all unfold, you really are right in the center. Awesome. Thank you. Was a pleasure.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for joining us. 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 dot info, forward slash 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 dot info, forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye, Program Director for Widening Pathways to Work at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation, addresses the critical gap between employers' intent to adopt skills-first hiring practices and actual implementation. Drawing from his background in higher education and workforce development, Agbeshie-Noye discusses the newly launched Center for a Skills First Future, designed specifically to support small and medium-sized businesses that employ half of all Americans but often lack the resources of large corporations to navigate hiring transformation. He explores the striking disconnect where 90% of employers acknowledge the benefits of skills-first hiring, yet only 15% have actively implemented it, and explains how the Center's many resources—including a Skills Action Planner, resource library, skills-first credential, and vendor database—helps employers determine an achievable place to start rather than boiling the ocean. The conversation addresses frustrations from both job seekers navigating an AI-enhanced application landscape, and employers struggling to distinguish genuine skills from enhanced resumes, while emphasizing that skills-first approaches complement rather than replace traditional degrees by treating skills as the primary currency for understanding what all credentials represent.

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: So our conversations on the podcast and in our consulting practice recently, increasingly revolve around the movement to a skills first approach to educating, hiring and developing talent.

Julian Alssid: Absolutely Kaitlin and and today we're turning our attention to the employer side of of that equation. And this is a critical conversation for all employers, but it's particularly critical for small and medium sized companies, where half of all Americans work. These smaller companies often lack the dedicated resources of large corporations to measure and track skills development, and it makes it challenging for them to adapt to new hiring models.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's right. And while skills are all the buzz, there can be a real gap between intent and action. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM Foundation, 90% of employers acknowledge the benefits of skills-first hiring, but only 15% have actively implemented it. That's a striking gap, and many HR leaders and executives recognize its strategic value, but struggle to implement significant changes.

Julian Alssid: Our guest today is uniquely positioned to address this challenge with a particular focus on helping small and medium sized employers unlock a wider range of qualified candidates by valuing a candidate's abilities and understanding how skills relate to traditional credentials.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Isaac Agbeshie-Noye is Program Director for Widening Pathways to Work at the SHRM Foundation. Over the last decade, he's served in a variety of leadership roles across nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions, and focused on aligning strategy, culture, and operations to create lasting transformation. He's also been an instructor for undergraduate and doctoral student seminars, exploring his passion for easing student transitions through their educational experiences. Isaac earned his bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Virginia, as well as masters and doctoral degrees in higher education administration from George Washington University. Isaac, welcome to this podcast. We're so excited to have you on Work Forces with us today.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Julian Alssid: Yes, and thank you for joining us, Isaac. We've talked a little bit about your background. Well, tell us a bit more and what led you to your role at the SHRM Foundation.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: I got here in part because I'm always very fascinated and very passionate about education and how people go about learning things that then activates them to do things. And so working in higher education, and encountering all of these college students that came in at 18, 19, 20, 21 years old with some understanding of the things that they thought that they were going to do for the rest of their lives, that was just really fascinating to me. And then seeing the evolution over time where their mind changed around that thing, that was also fascinating. I ended up getting into workforce development and talent cultivation, because I realized that it wasn't just enough to understand what they were learning when they were on the college campus, I was really intrigued by then what did they do? Like, where did they go? Where did they end up? How did they navigate their careers after they left that environment? And so that kind of helped me think more broadly, beyond getting people to degree attainment to getting them actually to career mobility and to ultimately, a productive citizenry, which is what, which is what the mission of higher education is actually designed to be. And so I got connected to the SHRM Foundation in part because I just have been really fascinated with, how do we get employers into the game even further to understand their role and to help them as they are trying to tap into this workforce that is filled with skills, but yet we're not matching people in ways that are quick, even though we can see some of the ways in which there might be alignment. And so this position is is actually structured to help try and address that, that gap.

Kaitlin LeMoine: As we jump into this conversation, we'd love to learn a little bit more about the SHRM Foundation and your role in widening pathways to work.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: The SHRM Foundation is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm of the Society for Human Resource Management. And the Society for Human Resource Management is the largest network of HR professionals in the world. And so we have 340,000 members that are then deployed and activated into all types of businesses around the world. And so we believe that we can leverage HR and leverage those professionals to advance social good, which is how the foundation came to be. And so in the foundation, we focus on three bodies of work: strengthening the HR field, because we don't often think about who's going to come behind the current HR folks, and who is actually going to take on the new challenges related to HR, and how are we positioning those folks to be successful in that, and so we have a body of work that's focused there. We have a body of work that's focused on thriving together, and how are we creating cultures of care within employers and employer environments. And so how are we focusing on things like the social determinants of health, about or caregiving or workplace mental health, the types of things that make people feel seen and safe at work in order to continue to be there. And then the third part is my area, which is the widening pathways to work area which is focused on skills first, and the things that we do to help employers adopt skills first approaches. How do we test things, try things out so that we are reducing the risk as best we can for people to adopt initiatives that are going to help talent be seen better. And then the other part of that is untapped pools of talent. So who are we not seeing and how can we create opportunities to see them better and also to get them fully activated in this world of work. And so the SHRM Foundation does all of that, and our goal is to try and figure out where are, what's the messaging, what are the levers, where, who are the partners that we need to bring together to actually make this ecosystem work for job seekers and employers at the same time.

Julian Alssid: Tell us a bit more about your area, Widening Pathways to Work. And in particular, we're really interested in hearing about the new Center for a Skills First Future.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: What's so exciting about that portfolio is that we're really trying to figure out what are the things that are getting in the way, and how can we start to solution around those things? And so we know that there are 7.3 million open jobs, and we are highly dissatisfied with that, because it's not because there's a shortage of talent. There's just a shortage of alignment. There isn't those connections and those systems that we're leveraging to make talent visible so that employers can make hiring decisions that make the most sense for them are, to some degree working, and in a lot of ways not working, and that is resulting in a lot of job seekers being incredibly frustrated, and employers also being dissatisfied with what they're getting. And in an age of AI, where we do have some functions that are being shifted based on technology, and we have job seekers leveraging AI to try and make themselves look more visible and competitive, we're in this environment where we have to be having this conversation about how we get these different sides to see each other. So that is what's exciting about the Widening Pathways work, because we are going to have to be considerate of all the things that are happening socially if we're going to make these pathways wider for everybody to walk through them. The Center for a Skills First Future we just launched that in June. We're really excited about that, because this is our try to help meet employers where they are, and that type of work is critical. You've mentioned before about our specific focus on small and mid sized businesses. This is intentional, because for large and enterprise businesses where you are well resourced to try a lot of things. And, you know, figuratively, throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall. You can try a lot of things to see what works. And then you can invest, or make investments based on what you think is working. And you have teams to support that you have, quite frankly, you have teams. To try a lot of different things. For our small and mid sized businesses, they don't, do not have that luxury as much. It's usually a team of one or a team of two that are driving all of the initiatives related to human capital in the organization. And so you can't, you know, it's hard to be thinking about managing benefits and also recruitment, and also employee grievances, and also onboarding and off boarding. And so what we were trying to do is to figure out, how can we put a series of tools at someone's fingertips and let them choose their own adventure? And so that's what the Center really tries to do. So we have four major components of it, where we are trying to take resources and make them most accessible. We have a Skills Action Planner, so any organization can go in and just knowing what's going on at the organization, you can take this assessment, which will give you a readout of your current state and where you are in terms of adoption of skills first practices, and also it maps out for you your desired state based on what you said that you would like to be. And we just then curate a list of resources to help you get from point A to point B. And so we try to remind people, this is this is the time to be ambitious, but we don't have to boil the ocean. So you get overwhelmed when you think about all of the skills first things that you could do. We try to normalize for folks, but it's okay to just do one thing. Just, let's just try that one thing and see how that goes. So whether it is removing degree credentials from a job description, or maybe it's leaning into behavior based hiring, whatever you choose that makes the most sense for where your organization is, we'll give you some tools to at least try and get that momentum going. We have a Skills First credential. It's a one of a kind credential. So for folks that are trying to learn more about what it means to navigate this space and how to navigate some of the barriers you may be running into in your organization, there's a space for you to learn and deepen your skill set so you can help bring others in your organization along, which is really exciting. We have a resource library where we are amassing all of the things scholarly and practically, that have been sourced around this movement, and having it all in one place so that you can search for it however you need to and get access to it. And then for folks that are further along than know this is what I want to do. I just need a vendor, or I need a partner to help me. We have a vendor database where people can go in and just access those professional services that they need to get something off the ground to move closer to implementation. And so we created this hub with the support of 14 coalition partners to really figure out, What do employers need, and how can we make those tools most accessible to them? We're acknowledging we are operating in this space because we have the connections to employers. We're not the only people operating in this space, and everybody has a different lane that they're working in some folks focus on talent. Some folks are focusing on employers. Some are focused on community based organizations. Some are focused on policy. But we all have to be in a conversation together about this, because the ripple effect impact all of us, and so it's great to also have brought together this coalition to be having these conversations together, and so we're excited about the center, and we're excited about how it can hopefully help accelerate adoption for as many people as possible, regardless of how your organization is structured or where you are on your skills first journey.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So Isaac, given that you know, this was developed with a coalition of employers, really at the table to help inform. I'm curious to hear a little bit more. What are some of the most pressing challenges you're hearing from employers? Like, what's the perspective of, I know you said, you know, maybe just start with one thing, right? Like, maybe it's hard to take on this whole skills-first bucket of work. But I'm just curious to know, you know, what are some of the perspectives you're hearing from employers and from job seekers in this new, relatively new skills first environment that we're operating in?

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: I'll start with the job seekers. I think that the process is frustrating. This is a tough job market to be in right now, and I say that not only is someone working to widen some of those pathways, but also as somebody that had to navigate that job market. And so I'm three months into this role, and so I also was on the job seeking side, trying to figure out how I get my skills recognized and validated, and this is a hard environment to do that, particularly. When folks are also leveraging AI to make enhancements to their candidate materials, like your resume, your cover letter. And so we're finding that a lot of things because of that look the same. So it becomes really hard for employers to distinguish who has done what. And so that is a very frustrating experience for job seekers to be in, where you want to be actively participating in work, but because of the scale and the size of the job market right now, it's just really hard to stand out on the employer side. We hear a lot about there's a lot of intent, as you mentioned earlier. You know 90% of employers want to be leaning into these skills first approaches. Only 15% have actually done things that's because operationalizing a big idea is hard, and change is harder, especially when you have developed a tradition around certain types of practices that you feel like makes it easier. Like before, a degree was a signifier for you that somebody had some skill or proficiency that you wanted, and you could then filter people out by that. Now we're seeing degrees are not the only place that are telling those stories. Experiences tell us that, skills tell us that, competencies tell us that. And so how do we create an environment where employers can see all of that and then know what to do with it, because it's just so much, and in that environment, not all things operate the same or are created equal? Not all credentials are the same, not all degrees are created equal. So for a hiring manager that's just trying to understand, can this person do what I need? There are so many things to consider to try and get to that answer, and we're then finding people are going through that process of getting through that to that answer, and finding out that that you know, there's more upskilling that's needed, or there are additional supports that are needed in order for that employee to contribute and actively participate. So there's just so many things going on here for employers and for job seekers at the same time, and because there are very few mechanisms for those populations, those audiences, to be talking to each other, that's just harboring more frustration right with the process, because people are not really communicating, and also people are existing with all of these challenges that seem insurmountable to try to fix. So what we're trying to do, at least on the employer side, is make it more digestible, to make it step by step, for us to start thinking about, oh, well, have you considered this? Let's just try this first, and let's see what we're learning from this. Let's understand what success looks like when it comes to this. And one other thing that I'd like to add is, I do want to emphasize, we have chartered this Center for a Skills First Future, and sometimes there's some confusion around what Skills First actually means. And so we are trying to figure out that many different ways that people can be visible to employers and employers can recognize and validate certain skills, but we're not saying that this is a complete replacement for the bachelor's degree, and so we're not working in competition with degrees. We're trying to figure out and get clearer about the ways that degrees also convey a certain set of skills. And so we're trying to treat skills as the primary currency here for us to even understand what degrees tell us when they come across or when applications come in. And so that is one misconception that I'm hoping to clarify, is that we are not trying to campaign against degrees. We're not saying degrees are not valuable. They obviously have a lot of value, but the underlying thing around a degree, a degree is supposed to signify skills and abilities and competencies, and so we're trying to figure out, how do we get closer to that, so that whether you have a degree or not, you can still be seen and can actively participate in this job market and contribute to the workforce.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Right. And so that everyone is communicating their skills regardless of what degree or credential has been attained. It's about this is the important thing for everyone. Yep. A lot of sense, yep.

Julian Alssid: Right. And it brings us back to that interplay between work and learning and education. And again, it's complicated. We can't separate these all out artificially.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yeah, they're all in relationship with each other. I will mention anything with talent is so it's challenging because success is always moving, like the metrics with success is always changing. And it's the long game. Like, you don't know when you sometimes you know when you hire someone, and you're like, I don't think so. Or maybe sometimes you might know, but for the most part, knowing that somebody can actually perform well, it takes time and but we are so inclined to want to know whether something works right away or not, and you can't do that with people all the time. It takes a while for you to know that, okay, this decision I made, using this approach worked, and I would, and I'm interested in doing it again. And so, so we're trying to remind people that this is a long game, and we can't usually see that the ship is turning while we're in it, but you can surely look back and say, Wow, look at where we were, and look at how our processes have changed, and who we've been able to get here and then retain over time. So we are on our way there in ways that will support employers and job seekers at the same time. It makes

Julian Alssid: It makes a lot of sense Isaac, and it's interesting Kaitlin as Isaac, talking this through, it so resonates for me in terms of the work we do, which is workforce and talent development, is really complicated. And it was complicated before AI, it was complicated before skills first. And it's not getting any less complicated. And so a lot of what we end up focusing on is trying to get to start somewhere and to iterate and to get some success, and to try to build on the success. And if something doesn't work to adjust, and as you say, because each situation is so different, each, you know, down to the employee or the company or the industry. And I guess the question I have for you is, and I understand that the Center's early days. You know, it sounds like you've been giving this a lot of thought, obviously, and interested to hear about any early wins, you know, sort of specific early wins that you can speak to where companies have begun implementing skills based approaches to you pick, recruitment, hiring, training.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Or even specific tools, right? Like, which tools are working really well, right? Because I feel like it is hard to know sometimes, like, what are the resources that are really going to stick and really help the most HR professionals? Yeah, right. I mean, given the number of members you have.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: I love this question, because there are just so many. There are just so many stories to tell. And this is, in part, what we are so excited about with the Skills Action Planner, is that it does give people also because they're reporting on their current state, they're telling us about wins that they've already achieved, that they may not even be recognizing as wins. And so if you're even at a place where you got to that Planner and you can say that I've had a skills first conversation with my team, that is a win. And so we're trying to at least celebrate those things and recognize those. But what we are featuring on our site is we have a host of employer examples. And so you can go into our library and click on employer examples, and we we have sourced over 100 different examples across different industries regarding practices that people have taken on, whether it's been focusing on apprenticeship, and using that as a gateway for people to enter the organization, learn about the role, and then to develop in the role, or we have organizations that have taken advantage of different ways of seeing and recognizing skills, so that they could then provide a curated list to employees regarding the types of skills they could develop in order to be competitive for a promotion or an advancement in their job. And so we've had examples around that. We've had organizations that have shared with us about ways that they're rethinking professional development or upskilling just based on what they feel like their future needs are. And so we've had organizations that have built succession plans built on the skills that employees who are leaving are leaving with so that they know then what to recruit for and how then they need to up staff themselves in order to perform those jobs in the future. So we have lots of examples there, so that people are leaning into those for inspiration. And it's not just you looking at a checklist and figuring out I need to do A, and then B, and then C. It's you trying to figure out, okay, this organization took this approach. They're working in construction, they're working in manufacturing, they're working in retail, and they have understood that this is a problem for them, and this is how they went about trying to fix it. That may not be the approach for me, but I could take some of the things that they've applied there to think through what could actually work for me and where I am. And so the employer examples, I'm going to always be yelling off of, I'm always going to be screaming about those, because more than scholarly articles and other things, they give you some idea about how somebody took theory and actually turned it into practice, but practice that worked for them. So I do encourage folks, we have quite a few on quite a few there, because we've had to design a product that hopefully was industry agnostic, even though people are always wanting to know people are always feeling like they are a snowflake, and in the world of work, like there's nobody else like them. And that is to some degree true, but a lot of the issues that we deal with are similar across a lot of organizations, and so just seeing some examples of how people have gone about it, and a lot of different examples hopefully helps to unlock people's minds and hearts to think differently about what it could be. And so I encourage folks to check out that library, just to see some of the examples that we have in there that we're really excited about.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So building off of your last response here, I feel like what you just said about, you know, the industry agnostic tools and steps and strategies especially, but you could, you could provide industry specific examples as well. I'm curious, what practical steps do you recommend that our audience can take to become forces in developing skills, first practices? What are a couple of takeaways you can leave our audience with today?

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yeah, so I will, I will respond to that in two ways. So thinking about audience as employer, understand where you are. So we have a we have that Skills Action Planner to just position people to just understand. Can you articulate what is going on at your organization right now? What are your needs currently, and what do you anticipate your needs being? And that is it's it makes the world of difference for you to know that it provides the greatest amount of clarity, because even HR leaders or other folks who are positioned hiring managers, because you can always level set with your leadership around here's where I think we are here's where I think that we're going. Is that right? And that is useful? And so I think that all employer partners, you're representing an organization, and you're listening, that is step one as an individual, because I also think that we all have individual agency here, step one is for me. And I told folks this at a conversation I had a couple of days ago. Do you understand what your skills are? Because how can we actually convince people that a skills first approach is it matters and is important, if you can't even articulate the ways in which and for me, the person, this is how I understand my skills are being activated in the role that I am currently in. And so if there is some opportunity for you to also do some understanding of what your skills are, what are you trying to develop? How is your organization positioned to help you develop those skills where there are opportunities, where you can try small things to advance your own skill development, and then recommend some of those things to others, like we have individual agency that we can certainly activate without getting the C suite level endorsement. And so I always encourage folks to think through, what does it look like in the environment that's most local for you, in the environment where you have control, and you certainly have control over your own professional development, and so if there's an area for you to lean in and just understand where you are, I think that that benefits and better informs whatever type of approach you're going to propose that other people jump on. I'll mention we have a here. We are piloting an HR apprenticeship program, registered apprenticeship program, which we're really excited about and also naturally made sense, because HR is the folk. The HR teams are the ones that are trying to convince other teams to take on apprenticeship programs. And so it would make sense for HR to also have an apprenticeship program to understand what the pain points are, because then you can speak to it from experience, as opposed to trying to sell people on a concept or idea where they're going to present to you the challenges, and you might not know how to respond to them, and so, so I always offer that just start local, start with what's in your locus of control, and let's see what lessons you can gain from that that can inform the way that you try and bring and motivate other people to come along.

Julian Alssid: Very practical, very grounded. I really appreciate that. As we wind down this conversation, certainly, we want to keep following your work so you know there's watch just you'll see us poking around, and hopefully we can have another conversation when you're a little further down the road with the sound of it. Yeah. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Thank you for this question. The center that I speak of is located at skillsfirstfuture.org and so when you visit that site, you'll see all of the components that I've discussed here. You'll see ways where you can tell us if we're missing resources that we should add, or even if you see an article that you thought, oh, this is really interesting. I'd like to share this. We love to hear about that. We have places where you can sign up to hear more about new things as we're developing them, and we will, in the future, be building a community component on there so that people can actually talk to each other about the types of things that they're doing in real time, and hopefully get some feedback there. So skillsfirstfuture.org is where you can learn more about all the things that I've discussed, and where you can plug in and talk to us as we're learning more things about how to accelerate some of this adoption for employers that hopefully will then benefit and inspire job seekers as well.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for that, Isaac, really appreciate knowing how we can continue to follow this great and exciting new work and really again, appreciate you joining us for this conversation today.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yes, thank you for having me. This was fun.

Julian Alssid: Thanks so much, Isaac.

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 dot info forward slash 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 dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.

Joe E. Ross, President, CEO and co-founder of Reach University and the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, discusses Reach University's "apprenticeship degree" model that turns jobs into degrees rather than the traditional approach of obtaining a job post-graduation. The conversation explores Reach's approach to addressing the "hiding in plain sight" talent crisis by serving the 40-50 million Americans in the workforce without degrees who wish they had them. Ross outlines Reach's three ABCs framework: Affordability, Based in the workplace from day one to graduation, and Credit for learning at work. He shares compelling outcomes from Reach's growth from 67 candidates to over 3,000 across eight states, with 70% graduation rates for Pell-eligible students compared to the typical 40-50%. Ross also discusses the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree's work with 50 institutions across a dozen states, and offers practical steps for listeners interested in getting involved with apprenticeship degrees.

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: Welcome back today. We're diving deep into a topic that's central to our work, the evolution of higher education to better serve the modern workforce.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, we are Julian. We've talked a lot about the need for new models, especially those that bridge the gap between learning and earning. So many of our conversations have pointed to the power of apprenticeships and skills based pathways, including our past podcast discussions with Bob Lehrman and John Colborn on the evolution of apprenticeships and the opportunities they afford learners and employers alike.

Julian Alssid: That's right. Kaitlan and as we discussed with Bob and John, the apprenticeship movement has been gaining momentum in recent years. Just in August 2025 the Trump administration issued a talent strategy report that calls for the expansion of Federal Registered Apprenticeships, including promoting stronger connections to universities and colleges. Our guest today is at the forefront of this movement, pioneering a groundbreaking model that's reshaping what a degree can look like, the apprenticeship degree. In fact, the apprenticeship degree was called out in the Feds report as a key part of the new apprenticeship initiative. And so today, we'll be discussing this and more with Joe E Ross, President, CEO and co founder of Reach University and the National Center for the apprenticeship degree.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Before building Reach, Joe served as president of the statewide association for county school boards in California, and served for 10 years as a locally elected school board member. He previously served as general counsel to a venture studio in several technology startups, and as a deputy district attorney, he acted as sole counsel in numerous hearings and jury trials. Earlier in his career, he served eight years on active duty in the US Navy. The son of a US Postal Service labor custodian, Joe went on to earn degrees from Yale and Stanford Law School. And Joe, we're excited to welcome you to the podcast with us today. Thanks so much for joining us here.

Joe E. Ross: Kaitlin, Julian, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Julian Alssid: Yes, indeed, it is a pleasure to have you, and if you will, you know, we've said a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear you tell us a little bit more, and the story of what led you to co found Reach.

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, sure. So first off, I must offer the disclaimer, I never imagined that I would be a college president growing up. That's not the thing that was on my bucket list, among many things, but I do think I, very early on, acquired a conviction that education is the way you build your own future, I think of it as the pen that you need to have in your hand to write your own future. As you mentioned, my biological father worked for the post office as a labor custodian (that means janitor), and my mom died kind of young, and he was injured in an accident. And I was raised starting at age four by my aunt and uncle, and I think in moving into that new household, in my little head, I must have noticed that these adults had careers and they had degrees and they had power over their lives. And I think in my little head, I thought, I want all three of those things, and I got it into my head that education was my way to those things. That's the only thing I can point to as an explanation for why I was such a nerd in school and so motivated in school, and also why later, after trying all sorts of other things with that pen to my hand, I was a Navy officer, I was a prosecutor, I was an ed tech entrepreneur, I always tacked back to education as where my passion was, and so about 15 years ago, I started running an after school program that sought to turn after school staff into teachers, and that was essentially a job embedded, apprenticeship based program, the first of its kind. And I saw this, this potential of combining work with higher ed. And so fast forward to the fall of 2020, Reach University launched as it's in its current form as an accredited nonprofit institution with a very simple mission, which is to turn jobs into degrees, as you said in the intro, as opposed the other way around. And that model is called the apprenticeship degree. Now.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So you know. Reach University has a unique B2B2C model, right where you partner directly with employers, but you have this dual customer approach of working with employers but also serving the needs of your learners. Can we dive in a little bit there? I mean, this is a complex model to build. How have you gone about it?

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, so it's, it's interesting, it's complex, but it also creates some simplicity as well. If you're running an apprenticeship degree, by definition, you are running a model that's based in the workplace from day one to the day of graduation. In fact, I'll back up. I probably should share for everybody what we mean by apprenticeship degree, and then that will lead lead to the answer. So an apprenticeship degree is defined by elements associated with apprenticeship going back centuries. This is not something that the Department of Labor defined 50 years ago or 10 years ago or this summer. It's something that goes back to a tradition that is very long standing, and apprenticeships had three defining elements that I think of as the ABCs that apply to an apprenticeship degree, a stands for Affordability for the learner, and in this day and age, that means without student debt, apprentices have been asked for their sweat, not for their debt, right? So at Reach University, we made this commitment the beginning, that no one would be would pay out of pocket. No learner would pay out of pocket more than $75 a month for full time enrollment in a full time work embedded degree program that's a for affordability. B stands for Based in the workplace from day one to the day of graduation or the day of completion. An apprenticeship degree starts with a paid job. It ends, or is designed to end, with a better paid job. And C stands for Credit for work, Credit for learning at work. Kind of has a double meaning. Learning at work means literally learning at work, but it also means learning put to work, theory, meaning practice. C also stands for Credential of value. This is not a compromise. It is still a Bachelor of Arts or a Master of Arts or an Associate of Arts. AA does not stand for Apprenticeship Arts Degree. It stands for Associate of Arts degree. So with that definition in mind, let me go back to B based in the workplace. The reason we think of this as a B2B2C model, as opposed to a, B2C model is because you can't run an apprenticeship or an apprenticeship degree without close engagement with employers and for the university. What that means, among many things, is that instead of coming to the university looking for graduates, the employer comes to the university at the front end, bringing the students, you work with employers, and then the employers engage their incumbent workforce, or they actually recruit new employees into jobs that come with degrees. And so what you end up seeing is a lot of partnership work with employers, which is kind of shoe leather and handshaking and presence on the ground, as opposed to buying Google AdWords and competing in the internet for advertising for consumers. And as a result of that, a B2B2C model is much more affordable to execute, and that savings gets passed on to the apprentices, to the learners, in the form of much lower tuition, much more affordability.

Julian Alssid: So Joe, your model, in a sense, is helping to solve labor shortages. And want to hear you talk about, like, who these who these learners are, and what kinds of jobs you're preparing them for. This notion that there's like, this talent, and you know the term like hiding in hiding in plain sight, yeah, is really what you're about, yeah.

Joe E. Ross: Well, we started five years ago with our teachers college, and we were focused on the teacher shortage. And by any estimate, there's many as 30 to 50,000 structural vacancies, to as much as 300,000 structural vacancies in teaching. And what we discovered is that in the very same buildings where principals were looking for teachers where there were classrooms without permanent staff, in those same buildings, there were a lot of human beings doing other jobs that didn't require degrees. They were working as classroom aides, as library aides, they were in the lunchroom, they were in the office, driving the bus. They were janitors, like my father and each of these individuals share, typically, the same story. At some point, they had to choose that job instead of a degree to take care of their family. For example, we did some research, because this was anecdotal, and this was something we were seeing on the ground, but we did some research. You know, if you look the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there's about 1.3 to 1.5 million classroom aids in this country, if there's only 50,000 teacher shortages, you only need a fraction of those aids, a fraction of those aides to get upskilled, earn a degree, to just end a teacher shortage. That type of ratio plays out in other high demand industries. If you look at nursing, there's a nursing shortage, but there's also a tremendous number of people working in hospitals as patient care assistants, or certified nursing assistants and many other roles who, if we actually treated those people as the talent we need and give them the opportunity to rise up, we would end these labor shortages and we create this upward mobility that we want this country to stand for. We bring it to life in places, particularly rural places that are education deserts. So that's basically the story here we have, on one hand, estimates suggest about 10 million high demand labor shortages in high demand industries, and on the other hand, there's 40 to 50 million people working in the workforce who do not have a degree, but surveys indicate they wish they did have a degree. And if we can actually move higher ed to think about that population, those 50 million people already in the workforce or about to enter the workforce, as the market for higher ed, as opposed to the 3 million graduating from high school every year, or maybe in addition to the 3 million who are graduating from high school every year, it's such a win, win. Higher ed has a new mission, 50 million people who were left out get brought back in, and we address labor shortages in high demand fields, particularly in rural, remote places where often the only answer is to do a grow your own effort, as opposed to recruiting effort.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Can you tell us a little bit, Joe about how this model works like a practical level. So you said, right? You know, people learners should be, you know, receiving credit for the work that they're doing on the job. But what does it look like to implement this?

Joe E. Ross: I think the apprenticeship degree is always met with this kind of, oh, this sounds too good to be true. Somebody can have a paid job. Half the learning in their degree program comes from that paid job. The other half comes from seminars held at night or on the weekends or asynchronous instruction. There's no student debt. There's a better paid job waiting at the end of it. Employers are feeling labor shortages, individuals are getting upward economic mobility, and people are kind of like, well, that's genius. Too good to be true. How do you do you do it? Just like you just asked, here are some things that need to go into the design approach. First, employers to higher education providers need to work really closely together to make sure that the degree design meets the needs of the employer. In many ways, the employer is the customer here. They should be actually, in many cases, paying for the program instead of the learner, right? So you have to work with the employers to design now and teaching that's fairly straightforward, because every state knows what teachers need to know, and it's pretty common across state borders what teachers need to know. Similarly, in other professions like a nursing or radiological technician or other allied health fields, the standards of what you need to know in those professions as well now, but you still need to work with employers to make sure that the program design works. And then from there, the employers are also your key partners. I said earlier in recruiting their incumbent workforce, or their new hires into these pathways with the promise that their jobs are not just job type jobs, but jobs that turn into degrees and then give you upward mobility after completion of a certain set period of time. In terms of the actual design of the model, part of what's required here is to rethink some practices that are often taken as rules or laws or regulations, but are just habits In higher education. And I'll give you one example. There's something called the Carnegie Unit that is about the ratio of seat time to homework time, essentially. And this is seen as a barrier to work embedded degree programs, because, oh my gosh, we had to have this much seat time, and then people have to, have to do this, this much homework, and then they have to work 40 hours a week. How do you fit it all in? And so one of the things that we did from the beginning said, Look, you can reimagine the Carnegie Unit as being a function of seat time and work time as opposed to seat time and homework time, right? So if you can combine seat time with assignments on the job, or sense making around what you're doing on the job instead of mindless, irrelevant problem sets or whatever the case may be busy work. But actually make work work, the work instead of busy work, the work. You can actually create an environment where for a learner, and this is the objective for a worker, one plus one in this case, equals one. It should feel like their job and their higher education pathway are the same thing. That's the key element of efficiency here that needs to go into the design. And then from there, there's things in a higher education credential that people think, Well, how could you do that in the workplace? For example, you need to know English or critical thinking or history or writing, or all these things that are referred to as general education? Well, it turns out you can carefully design the liberal arts component of almost any professional or occupational degree to be relevant to that occupation. We're designing a program right now in behavioral health, for example. And to get an associate or bachelor's degree, you need something that looks like writing and reading and literature for to be a degree, but you can choose something that's relevant. So we have a semester we're designing where there's two tracks of learning. One is psychology, one, two and three, which is with one faculty member, and then there's practice on the job. And the other track is literature, but it's going to be the literature of mental illness, right? And it's going to feel really integrated with the psychology track, and it's going to be relevant to the job. So that's the kind of curricular design work that I think the apprenticeship degree needs to entail. Because at the end of the day, these are working adults, and we know what working adults need, and we sometimes are really good at giving them what they need at the graduate level, but now we have to give them what they need at the undergraduate level to make sure the associate degree in the bachelor's degree truly is working better.

Julian Alssid: It's all about that context, really, and just baking it in all around. So then, given this integration and approach like, what are the metrics that you're using to track and what's your impact today?

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, we started with 67 candidates in our pilot cohort in the Louisiana and Arkansas Deltas. That was five years ago. We'll have well over 3,000 candidates across almost 500 school districts in eight states as of this fall. So the program is growing. That's one metric that's important. And in some places, school districts and parishes are reporting the sentiment that their teacher shortage seems to be going away, which is great news, and in part, that's because of programs like, like Reach University, and that's exciting to see when, when do you get to, like, actually solve a major social problem as a nonprofit leader in your life, it's always something on the horizon. We're actually seeing shortages go away, which is amazing. Notably, the population we're serving are overwhelmingly Pell eligible. And so Pell eligibility, I think, is a good proxy for economic need. And any given semester, roughly 70 to 75% of our enrollment is Pell eligible, 37 to 39 year old folks with families and full time jobs, and so they're eligible for Pell. And the typical graduation rate at the undergraduate level for someone who is Pell eligible is a shocking 40 to 50%. In our program. It's on track to be 70% for all our almost all of our cohorts. And I think actually, we have a tailwind in this case, because the number one reason that people who are Pell eligible drop out is economics. They need a job, but in an apprenticeship degree, they already have a job. So you've removed one of the major barriers to completion of a college degree when you pair the degree with a paid job from beginning to end. And so it's not surprising that we're seeing much better completion rates. We also look at retention, you know, the you know, retention is kind of along the way. The most challenging year for a Pell eligible first generation student is the first year of college. And so you really, you can't lose 30 or 40% in year one and have anything close to a 70% graduation rate, obviously, four years later, five years later, and and so we tracked that first year persistence really carefully, and we constantly, actually redesigned our first year to make sure that our first year candidates would had a better retention. We had some cohorts we didn't really like the numbers, like it was down to 70% for one cohort or 65% for another. And we redesigned our first year to integrate the general education courses and make them more working embedded. And so this first cohort is 91 to 92% retention. That's very, very good for a Pell eligible first year persistence. And then at the end of the program, we absolutely need to look at who, not only how many are completing, but how many of those who complete are actually getting the job that is waiting for them. Very often, if not in the same building, it's in the same employer network or the same community. But how many are actually getting that job, and then in a few years, in how many of them are seeing income gains? And if there's a measure of efficacy in the job, whether it's teaching or allied health, how are they doing as compared to peers who came through traditional pathways? And it's still early days for us, because we just graduated our first set of career graduated our first set of cohorts, but early data look very, very good in terms of both obtaining the job, getting the pay raise, and being rated by their employers as better than, at least equal or better than, in terms of performance folks who came through the traditional pathways.

Kaitlin LeMoine: These are some exciting initial outcomes. I know you said it's early days, but it must be exciting to be seeing these, you know, these types of success metrics, and I'm sure hearing success stories as well, right? Those, those anecdotes and qualitative feedback on on the program. So congratulations on that. I think you started to touch upon it a little bit with the redesign of your first year. I'm curious to know, like, what are some of the challenges you've experienced in these first five years of operation, and maybe give us an example or two on how you've addressed them, because it's certainly, as you said, maybe there's elements of this that simplify higher ed, but it's a really interesting model, and I feel like still relatively new overall in the higher ed landscape.

Joe E. Ross: When we first launched this undergraduate apprenticeship degree, we literally planned the semester right in time, right so we couldn't have any transfer students. We brought people in with no prior credit, and we kind of designed that first semester for them as they took it, and then the second semester was designed just in time, and we went through the whole program designing one term ahead of the first cohort. And then when we had upper division cohorts, we started accepting and transfers. Well, we learned a lesson the first year, because the first year, we actually tried to provide four or five work embedded courses at once to our first year students, which meant they had four or five different faculty at once. I don't know what we were thinking, but it's what we did. And of course, the feedback was, this is great, but this is really hard, right? That was the feedback generally from candidates and assignments were on the same time, and people were trying to remember the name of their faculty and their faculty and their peers and all that. And, at the end of that first year, we said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, there is a best practice here that it's already out there online higher education does one course at a time. This is a best practice for working adults. We already know that. And I went to the faculty and I said, look, we've got to do one course at a time. We can't do this five courses at once. And there was a little bit of concern because our faculty who, by the way, are job embedded too. So these were folks who are working in schools as principals, assistant superintendents, as master teachers. And they understood what I was saying, but they also were like, you know, I don't think we can get to know the candidates in five weeks if it's a five week course, or in 10 weeks, if it's 10 week course. And so what we decided to do, as we built the second year is designed a single subject, not a course, but a single subject semester. How do we integrate all the courses as one subject area, where one faculty member essentially would teach three or four, three courses back to back, but they were essentially the same type of course. So world history, us, history and social studies for teachers, integrated as one experience, but three courses on the transcript as an example. And so we did that for the second year and the third year and the fourth year, and retention and persistence and satisfaction and outcomes on licensure tests just moved up and to the right and then we finally, as I said earlier, got back to the first year, and we finally redesigned the first year. We're seeing great retention the first year as well. So I think we maybe should have known this before we started, but we essentially delivered to higher ed an AB test of what it looks like to have four or five courses at once, an apprenticeship degree, as opposed to one subject at a time. And the results are kind of overwhelming. Someone should write the paper on this and get tenure somewhere. But that's, that's, that's one of the big lessons we had at the gate.

Julian Alssid: Well, speaking of challenges, Joe, we know that you know your National Center for Apprenticeship Degrees is a thing that you've launched, and that it's working with traditional colleges and universities to adopt an apprenticeship model. Interested to hear about what you're doing there. And you know, we know that, you know you're getting to design this. You know, Reach University from scratch. What's it like? And what are the you know, what are the challenges you're facing with the traditional colleges and universities? And how are NCAD overcoming these challenges?

Joe E. Ross: So we launched NCAD about two years ago. NCAD stands for National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. And in part, we launched it because we had a teacher's college. And everywhere I went, people would say, this is a great idea. Can you do this in my advanced manufacturing facility over here? That actually happened. I was visiting a school district in West Memphis, and the assistant superintendent said, you have to meet my husband. He runs this factory across the river in Memphis. I was like, okay, so I visit this factory, and they give me a hard hat, which was fun. And they're manufacturing switches for railroad tracks with all this very, very next level equipment. And they take me through the factory to the back, and there's a state of the art classroom where this employer was actually taking people out of high school and putting them through advanced math and engineering classes so they could run the equipment. And he says to me, I should be able to confer an associate degree for all the training I'm doing on the job, and it would make it easier for me to recruit people into this workplace, if I could do that. That story times 100 made it really clear that this idea of an apprenticeship degree was not just for teaching or even allied health, but that this is something that could be part of a larger workforce and human capital strategy across industries, across geographies, and we're a startup nonprofit, the idea that we could address all that demand seemed a little nutty, but we did believe that what we were doing could be something that, together with other innovators, could create a tipping point, and that the larger mission of changing higher education - bringing it into the workplace was something that we could pursue. And so we launched the Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. And your question, I think, touches on the built in challenge there, because essentially, what we're asking higher education to do is to disrupt itself, right? Like classic disruption is about a simpler product that's more relevant to a larger consumer base that's not consuming. So targets non-consumption, and it's supposed to be something much, much less expensive, right? All of those things are really, really hard for big established players to do. Now there's some big established players that have figured out how to do it. You all came from Southern New Hampshire University. Did disruptive things there, ASU does disruptive things Western Governors, but there's 4000 higher ed institutions in this country, and not all of them are going to just drop everything and create a affordable face in the workplace, degree that rewards credit for work. But what we did realize is that there are some who are doing and that this is a field that's emerging, and one of the things you have to attend to in system change is avoiding fragmentation of an emerging, fragile field. So the first thing out of three that NCAT is doing is attending to making sure we're bringing together the emerging field of higher ed institutions and innovative, forward thinking employers who are launching apprenticeship degrees to address talent needs or to get an edge on their competition, whatever their purpose is. And that has been really successful. We've worked with 50 different institutions across over a dozen states where this is beginning to emerge. The second thing we took on with the Center for the Apprenticeship Degrees is, because we're out there in the field, we're we've become aware of who is really doing amazing things in the field. And so when a system or a state or a college wants to launch a program like this, we're able to provide capacity building support. And we've been doing that in Massachusetts and Colorado and a few other states as well. And then finally, there's a need to kind of build an emerging knowledge base about this field. And so NCAD, the National Center the Apprenticeship Degree, is focused on that as well. The challenge here is, I go back to the ABCs I mentioned before. All three of them are really hard. Affordability is hard because since the 1970s most of higher ed has had the assumption of unlimited student debt without underwriting at least at the graduate level, and that's created kind of a lack of discipline around designing high quality things at an affordable price. So that's that's a big challenge. Being based in the workplace means partnering with employers and changing your recruitment, changing your design strategies. It's not that that's hard to do. It's just not in the muscle memory of a lot of places yet. And then C credit for learning at work means giving up some of the sort of ownership and the direct control over where learning happens, and letting the assessment of skills and capacities and knowledge happen in the workplace that's challenging as well. There's a book that came out a while back called Whatever It Is I'm Against It, by a former college president, and it points to how it's how hard it is, generally in higher ed to work through committees. Committees don't generally drive innovation, but that's it's actually more complex than that, a degree is something that has the fingerprints of dozens of departments. It's not just the school of education that gives you a teaching degree or the school of nursing that gives you a nursing degree. They need to provide general education, which means they have to negotiate with history and anthropology and sociology and all these places that are providing these other courses and making them work. Embedded is possible, but it's a big change. And so at NCAD, the best thing we can do is not tell people what to do, but to surface examples of other places that are similarly situated, that have actually done this. And in Alabama, the phrase that I first heard, I first heard, I first heard in Alabama from the director of apprenticeship in Alabama. The key here is R&D, which stands for rip off and duplicate, meaning like, if we can actually at NCAD, enable folks who are trying to innovate to know what others are doing and steal from them. That's the theory of change here. Because innovators and entrepreneurs, whether they're in academics or technology, do not want to be told what to do, but they're very happy to steal from steal from others. It's kind of the congenital approach of an entrepreneur. So at NCAD, we're trying to make it easy for people to steal from each other, steal from us, and steal from each other, so that this model, which is such a great model, can grow and expand and be more available.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I would say, building off that point, Joe, you know, we always ask, What practical steps could you provide to our audience around becoming forces in developing apprenticeship degrees? I mean, we could take it from the perspective of, you know, a new employer partner or, like you're saying, a traditional, a more traditional college or university that's interested in pursuing this out of an approach.

Joe E. Ross: I think wherever you sit, whether you're an employer or an educator or a policymaker, I think the first step is to stop being part of a system that forces to choose, people to choose between a job and a degree. So ask, what can we do to convert jobs into degrees that then enable people to have the opportunity to be skilled up and to rise up in their workplace. So for employers, one of the one of the big opportunities here, I think, is to move from thinking of education as a benefit, which many employers already already do, to thinking about jobs that are designed to confer qualifications, certificates, and degrees by design. Because if your jobs are not dead end, but instead developmental, you attract a different kind of talent. And there's so many young people right now, including my own children, who are out of college, who judge the quality of a job by what they think they will learn and what people will see that they have learned in that job. So think about jobs as places where your workplace becomes kind of a college campus. I think that's the call to action for employers, for higher ed leaders. I think that getting around this idea that you can deliver quality but also be radically affordable. It's hard for some to imagine, but it's eminently doable, and part of the way you do that is letting your employers drive your enrollment strategy, which saves a ton of money. And number two, really looking for effective ways leveraging technology and and best practices to award credit for work. Everyone knows that doing is a way of learning. Learning by doing is the expression, right? But that doesn't have to water down the academic enterprise. You could do so much sense making with what people are doing on the job. That makes it still true higher education. And then finally, I'd say policymakers, we're strong advocates of policymakers at the federal, state, local level, looking for ways to bring forth predictable funding that has incentives for affordability and outcomes built in unlimited debt does not incent affordability and full time enrollment dollars don't necessarily incent outcomes. So I think the challenge here for policymakers is, how do you set up mechanisms that cause the market to answer the call? If I knew that if somebody completed X amount of credit and learning in x, in y, amount of time, I would be paid Z, amount of dollars upon proven completion. I take that deal every day because I know my program achieves those outcomes, and it's a better use of public dollars, as opposed to sort of stuffing the channels, which is what we've done over the last 50 years. Basically just make it easier for people to go in debt, make it easier for people to go, encourage everybody to go. That's gotten us into this, right? So I think policymakers have a real opportunity here, with the changes that we're seeing at the federal and state level to incentivize apprenticeship degrees, to deliver the kind of outcomes that I'm talking about. And I think actually we're going to see some movement here on this front I actually think there's a lot of conversation. It is a bipartisan issue. Everybody seems to love the idea of apprenticeship, and everybody loves the idea of an apprenticeship that leads to a degree. So I think there's a lot of hope to be had here on this front.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, no, it's so true. It is definitely. And I kind of was implying that in my little first comments, that this is, you know, there's been this growing movement, and it's totally bipartisan. And I think a lot of the challenge has been that, you know, it's perceived as really hard to do and come and bureaucratic and cumbersome and and what's been so wonderful talking to you is how you know, clear eyed you are about this, how you break it down, you know. And obviously there's a lot of complexity, and I'm sure there's way more, many more challenges as of course, there always are. But that, you know, here you have this entrepreneurial pursuit that's getting things done. You have some strategies for the the legacy institutions and and, you know, at a time when there's really heightened interest and it's all over the place. Everyone's got issues. Employers can't find the talent they need. People don't want to go into debt forever and get nothing in return. And so I guess the perfect start winding down. Would love to hear from you about how our listeners can learn more and continue to follow your work.

Joe E. Ross: Well, great. I love the opportunity to invite people to visit our website and invite people to visit our social media channels. Reach.edu is where you can find Reach University. Join us there if you are interested in the National Center for the apprenticeship degree at ncad.org, N-C-A-D dot org, we have a podcast. It's called Apprenticeship 2.0. It comes out every two weeks, so tune in, and we'll actually tell people to tune into your podcast as well, because this is a great conversation for people to tune into, and the other ones have been as well. We're on LinkedIn. We post a lot of LinkedIn if you're truly interested in getting involved in this movement, if you email [email protected] someone, someone will get back to you and connect you to a way to get involved in launching and expanding the apprenticeship degree movement the United States.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for sharing all of those various avenues for people to get involved and learn more. And appreciate you joining us on show today.

Joe E. Ross: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me and I look forward to to the continued conversation.

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 dot info, forward slash 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 workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.