Work Forces

In this episode of Work Forces, Kaitlin LeMoine and Julian Alssid kick off season three with a conversation with Kermit Kaleba, Strategy Director of Employment Aligned Credential Programs at Lumina Foundation. Kermit delves into Lumina's mission to increase credential attainment and reduce racial disparities in education and employment. He discusses the challenges and opportunities surrounding the development of high-quality short-term credential programs and their alignment with labor market demand. Kermit also shares insights into the evolving landscape of workforce development and how Lumina is supporting community colleges and other partners in meeting the needs of the 21st-century workforce.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Welcome back. Julian, isn't it exciting to be kicking off season three of Work Forces?

Julian: It is indeed, Caitlin. I can't believe it's been 21 episodes and I'm definitely looking forward to this season to continue to unpack the cross-cutting themes and opportunities and challenges that are shaping the future of work and learning. Absolutely. We aim to keep our audience ahead of the curve as the landscape continues to rapidly evolve across education, industry, and training really at the levels of both policy and practice. And we truly appreciate the feedback and engagement we're experiencing with our audience and our guests. So, to kick off this season, we're so glad to welcome Kermit Kaleba, Strategy Director of Employment Aligned Credential Programs for Lumina Foundation. Kermit has been a key player in workforce development and policy for many years. For Lumina, he leads a portfolio designed to increase the number of occupational short-term credential and associate degree programs. Kermit previously served as Managing Director for Policy at National Skills Coalition. He also served as Executive Director of the Washington DC Workforce Investment Council. Kermit has a JD and Bachelor's Degree from the College of William and Mary, and we are so glad that he's able to join us on this podcast today. Thank you, Kermit.

Kermit Kaleba: Thank you guys for having me here. I'm very excited.

Julian: Yes, Kermit, thank you. And we're thrilled to have you. And I guess to kick us off, we'd love to have you tell us about your background and how you approach your work at Lumina.

Kermit: Let me just, I guess, start by sharing a little bit about Lumina Foundation and the mission of Lumina, and then how I came to be a part of the organization. Lumina Foundation is one of the nation's largest private foundations focused exclusively on post-secondary education and training. We're headquartered in Indianapolis, but we work nationally. And Lumina is known for really for two north stars in our giving strategy. The first is our focus on credential attainment. Back in 2009, Lumina established or set out to establish a national goal of trying to get to 60% of US adults between the ages of 25 and 64 a post-secondary degree or high quality credential, quality post-secondary credential by the year 2025. And that goal has been, we think, very influential in helping to drive policy and practice in the higher education space. We've seen about a 16 percentage point increase in credential attainment since we announced that goal. So we still have progress to make, but I think we are making progress towards that goal. And the other North Star in our giving is our commitment to racial equity. We're an equity first organization. We know that one of the reasons why we haven't met the goal of the 60% goal is because of historical choices, barriers that we've created for learners of color in education and employment and in other spaces. And so in our grant making, in addition to looking to expand credential attainment, we are also looking to reduce racial disparities and make sure that learners of color have meaningful opportunities for education that leads to good jobs and further educational opportunities. A little bit about myself. So I, as you mentioned, I lead a portfolio called the Employment Aligned Credential Program Portfolio. And that portfolio is focusing on, we know that many adult learners are looking for shorter term credentials. Folks are looking to get into the labor market quickly, looking to update their skills. They're often facing family or work circumstances that make it difficult for them to do longer term educational pathways. And so we know a lot of adults are hoping to take short term credentials to be able to move quickly into the labor market or advance in the labor market. And our portfolio is really, how do we make those credentials, how do we identify those credentials that work? How do we help people get into those pathways? How do we make sure that they align with labor market demand? How do we make sure that they connect to further educational pathways? And how do we make sure that those opportunities are equally distributed or fairly and equitably distributed? I came to this work, my first real introduction to the world of short-term credentials. And it is really, it's kind of an interesting ecosphere. I started working on this back, you folks may remember in the last decade we had the federal government was funding what were known as the TAACCCT grants, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants, I think is the acronym. And these were grants, federal grants that were meant to support industry community college partnerships. It was $2 billion over four years and these were really, really popular grants in obviously in the community college space as community colleges were looking to build partnerships with industry and build pathways into targeted sectors. And one of the, one thing we started hearing in 2015 or 2016 from our college partners was we are building, you know, these grants are great, we're building these programs and these pathways, we're working with employers, we think these are going to create good opportunities for workers in our area. But for a lot of the programs we're creating, they aren't eligible for federal Pell grants or financial assistance because they're 10-week programs, they're 12-week programs, they're designed to be quick, they're designed to get you quickly into a new job. And the Pell Grant program only covers programs of 16 weeks or longer. And so even though we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, we're building the kinds of programs that industry is asking for. We can't get people to get into these programs because of the financial barriers. And so I, at the time, you know, I was the, I was doing federal policy at National Skills Coalition and we thought, oh, this seems like a problem we can solve. If these are federally funded projects, we should be able to make it so that federal financial aid is available for these, for the credentials and the programs that we're creating. And, you know, here we are, you know, 10 years later and I'm still working on this issue.

Julian: A century later, or not quite.

Kermit: Well, so that led me to start working on Short-term Pell, or Workforce Pell as it's sometimes called. And so we worked with, when I was at National Skills Coalition, worked with Senator Kane's office around the introduction of what was called the JOBS Act. And one of the things that came out of the, you know, when once the JOBS Act was introduced and the conversation started to grow around the possibility of expanding Pell short-term programs, there were some natural questions that came up about quality, right? So as folks know, there are a lot of non-degree credentials that are out there in the ecosystem. Credential Engine put out an estimate of about a million separate individual credentials. For job seekers, for businesses, for institutions, there's often a lot of questions about how do we know what quality is, how do we define quality, how do we get good information about whether or not these credentials provide you with the skills and the competencies that you need to be successful. And that in turn led us to a project looking at how are states defining quality non-degree credentials in their workforce system, in their higher education system, in their secondary system. And that in turn led me when this opportunity came up at Lumina to make the leap and really start to think about how do we support better, how do we answer that question of what are quality credentials, what are the mechanisms that we need to have in place to identify those credentials and to build those credentials and to make sure that people have the supports that they need to, not just to get the credentials, but to be successful on the job.

Kaitlin: We appreciate learning that story and that journey and can certainly see how it's brought you to this point. Can you describe some of the projects within your portfolio at Lumina? I'm sure some of them connect to what you just shared, but we'd love to hear a little bit more.

Kermit: I have sort of three kind of discrete sets of projects that I support. I have one set of invest. One set of projects is what we sort of inside we call our supply side strategy. And that is, one of the things we've learned about non-degree credentials is that we don't have a particularly robust policy infrastructure in this country around non-degree credentials. What I mean by that is we don't have financial aid for a lot of these programs, particularly on the non-credit side of community colleges, even as those are important. We think they're pretty somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.7 million adults who are enrolled in the non-credit side of community colleges every year. But many of them are not eligible for federal or state financial aid. Institutions don't often many states don't don't fund workforce development or non-credit programs through their their institutional, their formula funding for institutions. Many states don't have particularly robust data on workforce or non-credit programs that offer through community colleges. And students often aren't offered the same level of support services that their counterparts on the for credit and the more traditional academic side are. And so one of the theories that we have is that this lack of policy infrastructure is sort of holding us back in a way. If we were to be more intentional about making dedicated investments and tracking those investments that we would see better outcomes in the workforce development space that if we had, if states and other stakeholders had skin in the game about the outcomes for these programs in a meaningful way that we would see, we would see better outcomes. And so in this set of projects, we invest in research to better understand the landscape of non-degree and non-credit programs and the policies that govern them. So for example, we've been funding the Association of Community College Trustees to look at funding formulas for dual enrollment and non-credit and for credit programming at the state level to better understand how are states investing. And we've also done some research around state credential definitions, quality credential definitions under Perkins, et cetera. And we fund some technical assistance with states that are looking at expanding their financial aid programs for non-credit to help them think about student eligibility, programmatic eligibility, and funding levels to make sure that they're being intentional about helping people get access to high quality credentials. The other two sets of work that we invest are fairly similar, but we also have a number of projects that are more on the programmatic side. So one of the things we know about non-degree credentials, workforce credentials, is that you need alignment with industry. And one of the best ways to think about aligning credentials with employer needs is what are often referred to as industry or sector partnerships. So bringing together multiple employers in a local or regional industry with their community college partners, and sometimes other partners, to build pathways into and through those industries. So we are funding a number of projects that are looking at this intersection between industry and community colleges and in many cases working with other stakeholders around diversification of those pipelines. So in addition to making sure that the colleges are delivering credentials that lead to good jobs or trying to lead to good jobs. We're also trying to think about how do we expand opportunities for learners of color in key industries like healthcare and in various manufacturing and IT sectors where we know there are good job opportunities, but those job opportunities have not always been available or readily accessible for particularly for workers of color. And then a third set of investments that we've been making is is in the infrastructure space. We knew when I first started in 2021, there was a lot of discussion about the possibility of a big new infrastructure bill coming from the federal government, Congress and the administration. And we wanted to see if we could help position community colleges in particular as partners in building the workforce that would be needed to help support those infrastructure projects. Do you hear President Biden talk a lot about the millions of jobs that we created through the IIJA and the IRA and the CHIPS Act and how many of those jobs won't require a four-year degree. Well, we wanna make sure that we have the training and workforce infrastructure to address those job opportunities. And so we have a set of investments that we've made in California and Virginia and other places around trying to better position community colleges and technical colleges as training partners in that space.

Julian: So Kermit, given the investments, the portfolio, your experience, Lumina's experience more broadly, does Lumina, like what does Lumina see as credentials that work?

Kermit: That's a great question. I'll speak for myself. And we do have a, as part of our credential attainment goal, when we calculate our credential attainment goal, we do include some non-degree credentials, certificates and certifications as long as they meet a particular wage threshold. So I always get this wrong, but I believe it's 15% above what you could earn with a high school diploma. So that's one way of thinking about defining value is does it offer a wage premium over not having a credential? I think there are other definitions of value that are also important. One of the things that I know we look at is, does it lead to further educational pathways? So a credential that gets you a job is important. We want to make sure that people can get employed. But does it stack to further educational pathways? And is there a good, are there are there reasonable policies and practices in place that allow people to stack? I think one of the things we've been talking about in this space for a long time is the importance of creating stackable credentials to ensure that learners who may not be able to stay in education for two years or four years at a time, giving them the opportunity to get education in bite-sized chunks and then come back at different points in their career and expand their skills. We know that's really important. We also know the data shows that it isn't happening as much as we'd hoped when we first started talking about stackability, Lumina has funded research around stackability. And we found that there are very few folks who, for example, start on the non-credit side, end out going on to the for-credit side. And I think that's something we as a field need to ask some deep questions about and try to better understand why that's not happening. It makes sense on paper, but I think one question is, is it really aligned with what people are experiencing when they're in the labor market and in life? And I would say the other, we're also interested in understanding, coming back to your question of what is a valuable credential? I think we're also interested in sort of understanding the value of the credential from the demand side. So how do we make sure that the credentials that are being, that are being created and offered really do provide the skills and the competencies that are necessary to do the job. So just as it's inefficient and wasteful for someone to spend time from a learner perspective getting a credential if it doesn't align with labor market value or align with labor market demand, the same is true from an employer perspective. You want to try to reduce the gap between what somebody needs to know to do the job on day one and what the credential is offering. And so I think we're also interested in looking at it from that perspective.

Kaitlin: Thanks so much for that response, Kermit. And I think, you know, building on that, I think you're already starting to touch upon it. But, you know, as you're seeing your, these projects unfold under these different buckets or themes, what are some of the challenges and successes that you're seeing in the different projects?

Kermit: One one obvious challenge that we uh... we have been running into is uh... you know as i mentioned Lumina is very committed to uh... reducing eliminating racial disparities and uh... and helping to dismantle the uh... structural racism that has impacted so many people in this country's history and continues to have impacts for for learners and workers of color today uh... anything one of the challenges that we have been facing is that there has been this backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion in many parts of the country. And that has, I think, limited the ability of some of our, certainly our higher education partners to fully participate in some of the projects that we want to support because of concerns about being, running afoul of policies or just the political climate in their states or in their parts of the country. While that has been a challenge, it also then creates an opportunity, particularly for our employer partners as we're making these investments, to, you know, employers will tell you that diversity, diversifying the workforce is not just the right thing to do, but it's the economically imperative thing to do. And so I think we are interested moving forward in thinking about how employers can be contributing to uh, uh, be contributing in this space and, and signaling the importance of diversifying their talent pipelines and making sure that they have, uh, that they are able to engage everyone in their community and, and, and not just, um, not just the folks who have always benefited from these investments. Um, I think that's so, so it is a challenge, but I think also, hopefully there's an opportunity here. Uh, I would say another challenge that we're seeing is candidly, and I think we're probably somewhat guilty of this, is initiative fatigue. Community colleges are really marvelous institutions. They do so much, right? They provide traditional academic instruction, leading to a two-year and in some cases, a four-year degree increasingly. They provide education and training. They provide dual enrollment. They provide community services. And they do so often without the level of resources that other higher education institutions get. They're positioned as the low cost option for both academic and workforce training. And I think we agree that they are amazing institutions, but they are often asked to be, they're being asked to do a lot with very little. And so one of the things we try to do with our grant making is create a space to be able to have conversations or to be able to do work that may not otherwise be able to be prioritized. But of course the challenge I think a lot of the institutions we're working with are facing is the, there's only, you know, there's only 40 hours or 50 hours or 60 hours in the week and you can only do so much. And so I think that's, I think that's one of the things we're just being, we're very conscious of is, you know, making sure that we want to create the opportunity in the space for our partners to be as innovative and strategic as possible. But we also need to recognize that they have day jobs. And so even as they want to kind of move the ball forward and be innovative and forward thinking, there is a day-to-day reality that they have to deal with. And I think that is always a tension in the philanthropic space is making sure that you understand and respect that balance that you're asking of folks even as you try to partner towards a new goal. So I think those are the two kind of biggest challenges that I can think of. I would say, well, and I should say there's also, I think, a lot of expectations being put on these institutions without necessarily a lot of support for some of the things. So, for example, we know community colleges are being brought into a number of federal grants that are coming out from the many agencies. And I think in many cases, there's the money is there, but there isn't necessarily there isn't necessarily an opportunity or a space to talk about how do we how do we do this? How do we do this? Well. How do we learn from each other? And so that's something that I think we're starting to watch for the future is are there opportunities for us to help support institutions, community colleges, and other partners as they're looking to implement these federally funded programs? Can we help them be more effective and can we help create spaces for them to learn about best practices and lessons learned in the implementation of these exciting new funding opportunities?

Kaitlin: It does seem to me like a challenge in this work is just, and Julian and I talk about this a lot, but just how fast the world is moving and how fast the landscape is evolving and the complexity of how is it that you go about implementing a new initiative as maybe the expectation is you should already have the results and it's like, but we're just getting started. And then by the time you design your program, things have shifted again. And I mean, it's a really complicated space. I mean, I think it always has been, but it feels like things are moving faster and faster. I don't know if you have that impression as well, but that's something we've seen in our work.

Kermit: I still think of myself as relatively new to philanthropy, even though I've now been in the field for almost 4 years. And that is, I will say that is something that I have been struck by is the, sort of the evolution within, from when we have this initial idea to where we are a year later or two years later. And we generally, at Lumina, we generally do two-year grants. Yeah, it's right. There's the work changes, circumstances change, people change, the political circumstances change. And I think one of the things that we always try to do, Lumina is we wanna maintain our North stars, right? We wanna maintain our focus on credential attainment, We want to maintain our focus on racial equity. Those things remain paramount for us. But at the same time, we also want to be flexible and understand that the best laid plans don't always turn out the way you expect. And you learn new things as you're implementing a project, and you need to be prepared to utilize that new information, those lessons learned and incorporate that into what you're thinking. And so I hope, I like to think that we, in my conversations with the folks that I'm supporting and the groups that I'm supporting, that we do create space to pivot, to change as needed, to adjust to new circumstances. While at the same time, trying to, again, make sure that we're keeping in mind where we were trying to go in the first place. And if it's not possible, you know, then what is possible and what can we take away from, what are the lessons we learn? I think one nice thing about being in philanthropy that I discovered is you always learn something. You know, every project, every initiative teaches you something about the world and about the field and the craft that we've chosen. And I think that the key thing is to make sure that you're evaluate and reflect on what it is that you've learned and how that can inform your thinking moving forward.

Julian: So Kermit, let's put a pin in that for a second. I want to move us to kind of what you're learning and how it's influencing you. Another trend or something that keeps coming up in our conversations, Kaitlin, and my thinking having sort of toiled in the workforce fields now for 35 years is that, when I started this work, this was like the fringiest of fringe work, right? And I mean, I think it probably was somewhat when you got into it as well, Kermit. And now it's also just front and center. So not only is there this like swirl of stuff, but it's like, you know, these under-resourced colleges are now, you know, like in the spotlight, like never before as well.

Kermit: Yeah, having been in this space for 20 years, I would agree with that observation that workforce development has definitely shifted in terms of its importance to policymakers and the public perception. I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I think we know that there are some changed perceptions about the value of higher education, I think some questions about the return on investment and a greater sense from policymakers and from job seekers and from businesses that they want to see a clear and immediate return to higher education. And workforce development is seen in many ways as a kind of a good solution to that problem. And I think part of the reason why you're seeing a growing interest in short term workforce credentials from policymakers is because of that belief that this is about getting people the skills and the competencies they need to be successful in the labor market and doing so as quickly and as efficiently as possible. One of the things we've been tracking is state financial aid for short-term workforce programs. And our most recent estimate, our partners at HCM Strategists estimate that there's about $5.5 billion that have been allocated at the state level for programs that can support tuition assistance for non-degree programs. And that's up from like three and a half billion two years ago. We saw in the, during the pandemic, you saw a lot of states adopting non-degree credentials as a solution. So I agree with you. I think there's a lot of attention. I think though, one of the challenges that we face is because higher education and workforce were seen as such distinct spheres for so long, some of these policy changes are happening kind of in sort of dribs and drabs. So there may be tuition assistance for non-degree credentials, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there are data systems in place that can count those credentials, or support services that can help make sure that those students can be successful, or institutional capacity to help build the programs for which that tuition assistance is made available. And I think that's the, I think, going to be the real test moving forward is can we translate this enthusiasm for workforce development in an abstract sense, right? This concept of getting people skills quickly and efficiently, can we translate that into an ecosystem, an infrastructure that actually does provide the supports that we know are necessary for people to be successful? I also think w have to be honest with ourselves that, I mentioned the estimate that we have a million different credentials out there. We have to acknowledge that some of them just aren't valuable or may not be worth the time you're spending on them. And so the promise of non-degree credentials is that they can do, that they can get people some wage premium in a relatively short period of time. And we know how important that is for a lot of learners because time is the one thing they don't have. Right. So it is, I think this is an important space for us to continue to explore because we want to be able to deliver on that promise. I think we, part of what we need to acknowledge is that we, we don't, we aren't able to deliver that promise with every credential quite yet. So the challenge for the field is how do we do this in a way that lives up to the promise for workers and for businesses, and is a good use of our public resources? And that I think is the kind of the evolution now and the challenge for the field today is, if we give you the resources that you've never had before, can you take those resources and run with them?

Julian: So as we try to move towards a more perfect workforce development union, what are the factors that are influencing your thinking moving forward, Kermit?

Kermit: Well, I'll tell you. So I think there's a lot of money out there now for workforce development. Although, interestingly, money that's coming from places that we probably weren't expecting. So if you think about the, we talk a lot about the three big federal infrastructure laws, the IIJA, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act. Much of the money, very little money for workforce development went to the Department of Labor and the Department of Education. A lot of the money that is gonna be used to create jobs and support job training is coming from agencies like the Department of Transportation or the Department of Energy or the Department of Commerce. So demand side agencies rather than the supply side agencies. And...So that's both a challenge and an opportunity for us. It's a challenge because I think for traditional higher education and workforce professionals, if you're used to working with your state labor agency or state higher education agency, you don't necessarily have a relationship with your state energy department or your water resources department and your municipality. And so there's a relationship building component and a really very important time component right, because the money is only going to be available for so long. So I think that it is it is a real challenge that is if you're if you're waiting for these these these new players, these new these new partners to come to you, they may, but they may not. And so it is kind of imperative, I think, for higher education to be more be be ready to start the conversation and make themselves available to be a part of these conversations. But then, of course, it's a real opportunity, right? Because I think we know that the funds that are out there, there are a lot of different job projections. But we know that there are supposed to be millions of jobs that will be created, particularly jobs that don't require a four-year degree. And so the opportunity is there for community colleges and other workforce partners to really step in and be the providers of education and training that help people get those jobs and advance into careers and further opportunities. So that's one thing that I'm thinking about is just the importance of taking advantage of this moment in time where we always complain in the workforce space about not having enough resources to do the work. And now if we're thinking creatively about how to build these partnerships, there's literally billions of dollars out there that can be used for workforce development, which is great to figure out how to do it. And I will say, the other thing that I am keeping an eye on is just making sure that we stay true to the equity goals that have been set. I think one of the things that this administration has done across a lot of these investments is really signal the importance of ensuring that these job creation opportunities aren't just are replicating sort of the same patterns that we've seen in these industries that we really are thinking about how to create new opportunities for women and for workers of color and other underrepresented worker populations. I think we have a tremendous opportunity and space to use this to really think creatively with employers and education and training providers and other community partners to really be thinking about what are the barriers that have kept people out of particular industries or particular occupations? How do we use this moment in time to be true to, I think, what our country's founding mission is, which is to create economic prosperity for all or to allow for economic prosperity for all. So I think that's something that I'm continuing to watch, is how do we structure the work in a way that allows us to really to follow through?

Kaitlin: Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like we could ask so many more questions, Kermit. So based on your lessons learned and, you know, and what you're thinking present day, what are some practical steps our audience can take to become forces in designing scalable employment aligned credentials and related initiatives?

Kermit: You know, I do think there's some tried and true practices around, you know, to the extent that our goal here is to help people find jobs. This seems fairly obvious and banal, but thinking about employer engagements and making sure that you're thinking about, are there jobs? What do those jobs require? When are those jobs gonna come online? I think this is an issue that we often forget, is the sort of hiring the hiring cycles that employers have and when they're bringing people on. I think building strong partnerships between employers and education and training providers and other stakeholders is really crucial. I think the other stakeholders are really important. I think one of the things we've seen is that if you're trying to diversify your talent pipelines, oftentimes the biggest barrier is trust, right? Do you have a, you don't have a strong history between industries and often between institutions and underrepresented communities. So engaging trusted partners in that space who can help broker and build trust is important. I think we're seeing that a lot. I think being prepared to have honest conversations with employers about what's working, I think put a lot of the pressure for the success of training on education and training providers without really thinking about what is it about the jobs that you're offering, whether it's the pay or the benefits or the work climate that makes you an attractive employer and makes somebody want to stay with you. I think we should be thinking about a training program as not just entering a class and exiting a class, but really you know, that first six months or the first year of employment is the if the program isn't working because people don't want to stay at a particular company or don't or aren't happy in the industry. Are you are you as employers doing everything you can to keep folks and are you are there things that you could be doing that would make it easier for you to not only find that the talent you're looking for, but to keep the talent to me. And one of the things we've we've been seeing in some of our earlier grants was um, you know, particularly around racial and gender equity, uh, you know, companies very excited about bringing in all female cohorts or really focusing on populations of color. But when folks showed up, you know, for their first day on the job, they found that the work environment wasn't particularly conducive and wasn't very, wasn't very friendly. And I think that's, that, that is something that you need to start to think about is what is the employer role in education and training beyond just sort of identifying what they're, you know, being a passive recipient of talent, how can you be an active partner in the success of your workforce? And so I think those are just some things that I think I wanna, we are interested in continuing to explore is how do you build tighter and more organic partnerships between employers and education training providers, particularly community colleges.

Julian: And Kermit, while I know you're in a policy role and saw that as speaking to the practitioners truth is number one. It's amazing advice and I would also Just sort of interject and for policymakers make sure all of that can happen.

Kermit: That's right. That's true. And I would say is what you're trying to which is clearly what you're trying to do and I and I think anything I will say this is the I think one of the one of the challenges we see right now is there's a lot of it, you know as you going back to the earlier question, Julian, there is a lot of enthusiasm for workforce right in this moment. I think you have a lot of policymakers who'd like to talk about the importance of workforce development. But it's important not to lose that energy, right? We don't want, we don't want this to be a scenario where two years from now, we sort of say, remember how we were investing in workforce? Wasn't that fun? Like we really, this is a, and I think that that's a, you know, called a, not just a policy makers, but to the field as well as to like, we have a moment in time and we should take advantage of it. And it won't be easy. This was never easy work to do. Resources are part of it, but it's still, there's a lot that goes beyond just the dollars and cents. But I do think we have, I think we are, I think you're right, we are in a unique period in history and in this moment where workforce development has its chance to really shine. And I'm excited to be a part of this field in this moment. I'm really optimistic about the future and hopeful for the future.

Julian: Yeah, great. Well, and on that positive note, Kermit, as much as I would love to continue this conversation for several more hours, how can listeners learn more and continue to follow your work as it unfolds?

Kermit: Certainly visit lumina.org and we'll post publications and information about our grantmaking on a regular basis. So that's, I think, the best way to kind of continue to follow her work. And I would say I'm gonna be out on the road traveling to a number of conferences. And this is a genuine invitation to anybody who may see me at a conference. I'm always excited to spend 20 minutes talking about your work and hearing your ideas. That's part of the, for me, the best part of the job is going out and talking to people about what they're learning and what they're seeing. And so...always excited to talk to folks. Or you can shoot me an email at kkaleba at lumina dot org, and I'm always excited to jump on the phone and hear what you're doing.

Julian: Kermit, we so appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. It's great conversation. So look forward to following your work and to keep on continuing to talk with you and checking back into the future.

Kermit: Well, thank you so much for having me. And thanks so much. And congratulations on making it to a third year of the podcast.

Kaitlin: Thank you. We really appreciate that and appreciate the support. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.

Paul LeBlanc is former President of Southern New Hampshire University. Over 20 years, he led SNHU's explosive growth, expanding access to over 250,000 students, to become the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the U.S. Paul shares his perspective on how artificial intelligence and the rise of tools like ChatGPT will bring deep shifts for higher education. He outlines the need to reinvent learning models and curricula, deploy AI judiciously, and coordinate global data sharing. Ultimately, Paul expresses optimism that AI's transformative potential can usher in positive change for society, if anchored by human relationships and wisdom. This forward-looking discussion provides higher education leaders timely insights on navigating AI-driven disruption through coordinated innovation that keeps learner needs at the center.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Julian: Hi y'all. With this episode we are winding down season 2 of Work Forces. We want to thank you, our listeners, for your likes, shares, and engagement with our podcast.

Kaitlin: We wouldn't have made it this far without your continued interest and encouragement and we look forward to bringing you a third season in short order.

Julian: To wrap season 2 we re-airing our conversation with Paul LeBlanc about AI and the future of higher education.

Kaitlin: This episode has resonated with individuals within and beyond those who contribute to the future of work and learning. We hope you will enjoy this conversation and will be back to kick off season 3 in our next episode. And here we go!

Julian: Today, we're thrilled to be joined by Paul LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University. Paul joined SNHU in 2003 and has transformed the university into the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the country, expanding its student base from 2,800 to over 250,000. Paul's been recognized for his innovative leadership and has earned accolades from Fast Company, Forbes Magazine, and Washington Monthly. And in 2018, Paul won the prestigious TIA Institute Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence in Higher Education. Paul's work extends beyond SNHU. He served as senior policy advisor to Under Secretary Ted Mitchell at the US Department of Education, and on several national committees focused on education, quality, and innovation. As a first-generation college grad with degrees from Framingham State University, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts, Paul's career has spanned from directing a technology startup for Hoetten Mifflin to presiding over Marlboro College before joining SNHU. And most recently, Paul announced that he is stepping down from his role at SNHU and is embarking on an exciting new chapter to focus on the integration of AI into higher education. Thanks so much for joining us today, Paul.

Paul LeBlanc: It's really great to be with both of you.

Kaitlin: So wonderful to see you, Paul. Thank you for joining our podcast. So though we've given this bio, can you please tell us a bit about your background in your own words and your journey of bringing SNHU to its current scale?

Paul: Sure. Let me do the first one in broad strokes. So my family immigrated from a very sort of impoverished rural farming area of New Brunswick, Canada when I was just a kid. And I was the youngest of five and the first in my extended family to go to college. My father had an eighth grade education. My mother had a sixth grade education. And they were, you know, my mom worked in a factory until she was in her seventies, and my dad was a day laborer and a construction worker. And like all immigrant stories, you know, they came because it was work and a better life. And indeed there was. So I have a kind of schmaltzy love of the American dream story. And because I watched the way that my two grown daughters have a life now that their grandparents would scarcely imagine if they were still with us. And that was because I had access to high quality, affordable higher education and changed the whole trajectory of my life and thus theirs. I think that dream has increasingly slipped out of reach for too many Americans and new immigrants and working people. So SNHU has been…what I loved about this place when I came in 2003, almost 21 years ago now, was that that in its DNA had always focused on those learners. It wasn't a typical college that started with a campus and 17 year olds and that bucolic setting we see on view books. It started in the second floor over the Palace Fruit Company on Hanover Street in Manchester and wasn't until 1968 that it had a campus. So when I arrived in 2003, it had about 2,500 students and they had sort of continuing education centers and those were evening programs working adults, but it also has a small online program at a time when a lot of not-for-profit higher ed was still looking down its collective nose at online learning, thought it was inferior quality, couldn't be as good, you need to be in a classroom with our faculty to have a great experience, and yet we watched as for-profit higher ed just rushed to fill that vacuum and people forget that at its height the for-profit sector educated about 12% of all American college students. And I thought, A, we could do a better job. We learned a lot from them. And then I think, though, I tell people all the time, when Phoenix University first came along, they really did good work. They thought hard about what does a working adult need in terms of support and service. It really, they only started to go sideways when they became publicly traded, and quarterly reports and shareholder value trumped good behavior, and then we all know how they went off the rails. So we set out to really look hard at what would it take to grow a nonprofit online institution that was laser focused on that 32 year old with three kids and a dead-end job, maybe some credits. How do they improve their life? And that's really been the driving mission of this institution. We've never wavered from it, you know, even though we're very large now, as you said Julian, and while we're financially very robust and healthy, we didn't raise our tuition for 10 years. We're still an affordable option. And we also didn't get distracted by chasing status. Like we've never, sometimes because we do have a campus, we're like, why don't we do Division 1 sports? That would put us on the map. It was like, and how would that make the life of our students better? Like, tell me again how that works for us. Or across higher ed, people will say, we want to get to a place where we can be more selective and get better students. Like, no, I love the students we serve. I don't want better students. I want us to be better for our students. And that's been probably our big driver. So the rest of the story about how we get to the size has lots of good luck and missteps. And we didn't know how to scale when we started scaling. In 2012, I think, Babson University listed us as number 50 on their list of the 50 largest nonprofit providers of online education. And just three years later, we were number four. And in those three years, we were number four. And in those three years, we were hiring 40-50 people and every Monday we were onboarding. We had you know mountains of Dell computers out in the hallways and and more and God we had no idea what we were doing like we just broke everything we had no idea how to scale so we learned some lessons we had our stumbles, but I think you know part of it got us through all of that was this unwavering focus on our mission and doing really good work for our students. So that's really sort of the story of our growth.

Julian: It really is such an amazing story, Paul, the theme of effectively leveraging technology in education has run through this story and contributed so much to the growth, right? As you've said. But reflecting on these last couple of decades, what are the trends and challenges that you've seen as a technology that has evolved and ushered in AI?

Paul: So I think, you know, among the sort of challenges we've faced certainly is the regulatory framework, you know, where we are a heavily regulated industry, and I think regulators have often also shared some skepticism of what was possible in online education. And look at the skeptics weren't wholly wrong 20 years ago. Like Clay Christensen has taught us this lesson about disruptive innovation, is that it usually isn't as good as the incumbent thing it later comes to replace or compete with. It gets better though in a very steep curve. Like it gets better fast. And we get better fast. And we started to harness data and data analytics. And, you know, we have lots of...every month we have kind of open day for visiting institutions. We're very collaborative in terms of people who want to learn what we do. And I would say that the showstopper almost every time is when that visiting team hears how we use data and sees 75 people on our data analytics team and they realize we measure everything. We measure how long does it take to complete a financial aid package? How long does it take to get someone enrolled? How are they performing in their classes? We monitor every section of every course 24-7. We know when students are stumbling, eventually, almost always, there'll be a provost, our president who turns to his or her team and says, how come we can't do this? Why don't I get to ask these questions? So I think one of the things we grapple with is really the poor state of data in higher education at the institutional level, where it sits in silos, there's a lot of data collected, but there's not a lot of data analyzed and put to work, and there are data, generally speaking, in the industry. Like we don't, like when I look at the iPads, I don't recognize us, me, or you, right? It's a weird out of date, like it's not real time. So. So I think that's probably our biggest challenge related to that would be our legacy systems. You know, someone said to me recently, because I have worked my whole career in higher ed, that's sort of like the goldfish who sees the castle and like, oh, there he comes. I just assumed that we were like a big lucrative market and people would want to build great technology solutions for us. That's not the case. We are dwarfed by K-12. We are dwarfed by finance. We are dwarfed by healthcare. The legacy systems that we work with in higher education tend not to be the most cutting edge, the most up to date. So I think some of our progress was leveraging industry leaders like in CRM technology. We deploy Salesforce as a lot of people do now. But when we did it at first, there were a lot of like, what is Salesforce and how do you use it? And by the way, what's the CRM? Those are the things looking back that I think we were able to push through and move pretty quickly on. But I think moving forward, I am in the camp that thinks AI radically changes everything. Like, I think the world is not the same today after November 30th, 2022, with the advent of ChatGPT. And while AI has been around for a long time, it's been embedded in our phones and in our GPS and in our back office operations, the idea that any of us can now augment our intelligence with natural language by just speaking a prompt or typing a prompt in English is revolutionary. So looking ahead, I think massive challenges for higher education, because I think there'll be massive challenges for the workforce. I think the workforce will be utterly changed and transformed. And if university's primary job is to prepare people for a world of work, and while as an idealist, I think it's about a lot of other things as well, but that's its first job. It's why society funds higher education, is to prepare people to serve society. We are a knowledge factor and a knowledge economy and now knowledge has to be fundamentally redefined. By extension, we have to redefine universities. I've argued elsewhere that all curricula became instantly out of date on November 30th, '22. Like if you weren't looking at everything you teach to say, does this major still matter? Like would you advise people to go into accounting? I wouldn't. Someone said I think those jobs are gonna get enormously displaced. Will there be no accountants? No. But I think it might be 10% of the current number because AI does it so well and faster and smarter. And I think we go through, you know, field after field. And then as McKinsey argues, something like 65% of jobs won't go away, but they'll be radically redefined. Well, you better start redefining your major then, like what are you teaching? And I, you know, I chuckle when I hear faculty in some instances say, you know we need to ban the use of ChatGPT in our classes and I was like, wow, so you would actually ban the very tool that will get students jobs, right? I mean, it's sort of crazy, right? So yeah, I think it's so exciting. So a lot of things have to happen to go to your technology question. A, we have to sort of, we have a lot of work to do. We're very early. Like, we're not gonna figure this out overnight. So we have a lot of work to do to understand AI, how to best use it, what kinds of tools. We need to think about our policies. We need to think about, we think things like academic integrity, the use of writing, what counts for knowledge, and we can go deeper on this one if you like. And then we need to think about how we use data as a sector. And one of the things that I've been working on with George Siemens, who's joined us as a chief scientist on our new venture, is a proposal for a global data consortium. And the idea is that you build better AI applications, you get new and better insights when you have more data. And as a sector, we're terrible at our data, so could we create a global data consortium where large-scale providers would make their data available. It would be pooled, protected in a synthetic layer to protect student privacy and individual data, but that we could all then have better insights. So the Gates Foundation has given us initial funding on the design. ACE, the American Council of Education, has agreed to house it. It shouldn't live with an institution, right? It needs to have a neutral home, so ACE is going to house it. And in the initial conversations we've had with various large-scale providers, if everyone joined who says they want to, the devil's in the details, and that's what we're working on now, we would have more than 30 million students represented globally in that data consortium. So I think it's a very powerful idea. And with that, we can start to counter things like algorithmic bias. We can ask different kinds of questions. We can combat cultural hegemony in the data. Like there's just lots of things that get better when you can do this globally. So yeah, it's an exciting, exciting time. I fret over all the ways we could get it wrong. But I do think there's a version of this that is incredibly optimistic and hopeful. So much of the AI discussion I hear is about real fears and well-founded fears, by the way, but a lot of fear about, you know, the ways in which it will disrupt our society and maybe displace human beings in various ways. And I'm looking around and thinking, is this working really well for us? Like what part of society is working well today? Like, I don't know, maybe human intelligence is overrated. And maybe a little bit of augmentation would be a good thing. I'm not looking forward to like our robot overlords, but there is an argument that says if we train people less around the issue of, and I know this is grossly oversimplified, but if the fundamental notion of the university and the college major is to answer the question, what do I need to know in order to be an X? What if you can know everything? What if it's all a prompt away? So maybe the better question we should be answering is, what do we need to know, or how do we need to think about the world so that we're better human beings, so there are better societies, there are better communities. And George Siemens argues, and I've come to agree with him, that the fundamental shift facing us, and it's a profoundly existential one for universities, is that we will spend less time worrying about epistemological questions of knowledge, because we're no longer the most powerful knowledge entities on the planet, but maybe a lot more time on ontological questions of being. What does it mean to be in this world? What does it mean to be a good human? And honestly, that would be sort of refreshing to my mind. And it might be that we see things like the decline in status for a lot of STEM and maybe a resurgence of the humanities. Looking very different than they do. I think they're kind of super out of date, but isn't that really what the questions of the humanities are about? So I think it's potentially a super exciting time.

Julian: As you're talking, one of the issues we're dealing with in the workforce world is there are a lot of very esteemed researchers, for example, looking at taxonomies related to skills and well, if we have the skills, we have the technology to see them all and read them all, then maybe our jobs are going to shift a little bit and it'll have all sorts of implications for the kind of dissertations we write and the kind of research we do. And as you say, maybe we can focus on making this world a better place. Not that we're not doing that already, but really focus our efforts on how can we improve quality of life and work and ensure that more and more people have productive and happy careers.

Paul: If you think about knowledge work, Julian, Stuart Russell is the wonderful computer scientist from Berkeley. He does a wonderful, if your listeners haven't heard it, the BBC has something called the Reflectors and there are four of them that Stuart Russell did in 2023. And he says, he makes a wonderful point, he said, if you had told our ancestors that someday in the future, this thing called a knowledge economy, you go to work into a big sealed box called an office building. And then you'll sit in a small glass box called a cubicle and stare at a really little box that has a bright thing called a computer screen. And they would say, and you'll do that all day, they would say, that sounds like hell. Right, like the work that's wonderful is can I be with people, can I be in nature, can I be making a difference in my community? And honestly, we have enormous need for those human jobs. I've argued this in lots of places like we should fill, we should flood our schools with great teachers and coaches and social workers, right? We should rebuild a mental health care system that is broken. I mean just decimated. We don't have a health care system in America anymore…mental health care system, excuse me. That's gone. We need to fix our whole notions of criminal justice. System after system in what I call in my 2022 book called Broken, what I call symptoms of care, those are all jobs that AI can't and won't do. They may be helped by AI, but these are distinctly human jobs. But if you think about all the jobs I just listed, our society doesn't like to pay very much for them. It doesn't want, it tries to have as few of them as possible, and they don't enjoy the status or support. That's what I think could shift. I think it'll have to shift because those are the jobs that AI won't do well and those jobs left to us. And they're actually jobs that bring people enormous sense of meaning and impact when they're well supported, when you don't burn people out, when you don't mistreat them. Carlota Perez, the economist, talks about this, right, which is, this is one of those moments where you get all of these things, new paradigm-shifting technology comes about, and it's usually around for a while in various forms, but it all comes together in a catalytic moment. So AI has been around for decades. ChatGPT is the catalytic moment, and now we're in the middle of what is kind of like an in-between time. And in the in-between time, all bets are off, like the world gets thrown into upheaval. And honestly, scarily, sometimes bad things happen, like wars happen, revolutions happen, because all the old assumptions go away. Feels like we're in that moment right now. And then, as she argues, in every case, you come out of it into kind of a golden age. Like the world just gets demonstrably better. It doesn't feel that way in the middle of the chaos. Like in the middle of the Industrial Revolution factories are being built and workers are being displaced and the agrarian culture was sort of going to hell. Railroads are coming through, stinking up the place. We're like, that was like, you know, go back to read English poetry of the, you know, early 1800s and it's a kind of a hellish version of things. But then look what happens when you come out of that and you raise the level of society, pull people out of poverty, improve lives. All of this good stuff happens. That's my hope.

Kaitlin: So building upon that point, Paul, that we're in that middle or early stage, early phase of this work. From your perspective, what do college presidents or leaders in higher ed or business more generally need to consider with AI becoming more mainstream? What does it look like to navigate this moment? Like what are some from a leadership perspective, some recommendations you could provide?

Paul: So one, I mean, get educated, right? We all need to learn a whole lot, play with the tools. So if you're a college president today who's not using these tools, I think you're remiss. I would encourage all my people as we have at SNHU to be playing with these tools. And then I think as articulated in a book called Power and Prediction, which came up, it's about AI, but it came out before ChatGPT, but it really predicted in many ways. I think organizations have to approach this in two ways. I think they have to look at the organization as they know it today. And then they have to think about the ways they can deploy AI to improve what they do. And I would say most are doing that. Like I see it at SNHU too–all over the place. Everyone's using AI. You know, there are 1.7 billion users of ChatGPT already. I mean, this is crazy. No technology has ever been adapted this fast. And you know, I was in Mexico recently and I was talking to an Uber driver who said his wife is a dentist and he does this on the side and he gets very side hustles and blah, blah, blah. But she does TikTok videos, kind of informational videos to support her business. And he writes the scripts using ChatGPT. And I thought, this is frankly a conversation you never would have dreamed of five years ago. Like literally a dentist doing TikTok informational videos written by and scripted by ChatGPT from her Uber driving husband, like crazy, right? So everyone's using it. So we need to be using it. And we'll see enormous productivity gains as we deploy what are essentially AI point solutions. So marketing will use in a certain way and admissions will use in a certain way and HR will use in a certain way, and they'll use different AI tools depending what they're trying to do and they all will see enormous productivity gains. Let me give you one quick example. Our marketing team of seven people produces these informational videos about attending college and they help our SEO search, positioning, etc, etc. Prior to ChatGPT, those seven people that can produce about 20 short form videos a month. Using ChatGPT today, they produce 150 a month. That's just an enormous leap, right? So we're gonna see all of that. But the authors of Power and Prediction, who happen to be three economists from the University of Toronto's Rotman School, also argue that the real power of AI happens is unleashed when you do a full system redesign. And I would argue that every university needs a sandbox with a small team, it's not a big team, who are given permission to kind of do a blank sheet of paper reinvention of the work. It could be, how do we reimagine this program in a dramatically different way, this major or some aspect of the organization. And that's what we're doing with the creation of Human Systems, which is our new public benefits company. So at SNHU, we're doing the first part, point solutions everywhere, massive impact and productivity, but the small team, the merry band of seven people in Human Systems, has been asked what if you could be unconstrained in your thinking and invent a new model of learning, a new university if you will, that keeps human relationships at the center, so human-centered, but relentlessly uses AI in every way. And that's the work that that team is setting out to do and that's the work I'll be doing after I hand over the keys to SNHU on June 30th. But I think that's, you know, university leaders have to be to really be getting smart, using the tools, encouraging people to use the tools, challenging their leaders to think about how to deploy AI within their respective area. That's the point. Solution strategy. And then creating enough of a sandbox to have some people really experimenting with more radical rethinking of what they do. Otherwise, and this is Clay Christensen's theory, right? And Clay very much influences my thinking, was a dear friend of 40 years and was on my boards. But what he would say is that if you don't want to be disruptive, disrupted, excuse me, with your incumbent work, do a great job on that, but make sure you have some other group on the boundary rethinking what the next iteration of your organization will be. And the problem is that I think most universities are built to be self-preserving entities. So the idea of could we reinvent and disrupt ourselves is a scary idea. It's the one, it's really hard to do. But we've always had this approach at SNHU at least that if we don't figure it out, someone else will figure it out and do it to us. So we might also be agents of our own change and evolution.

Kaitlin: Right. I think therein lies the complexity, right, of where we are now versus what you were saying about the future state of, you know, what are these human focused skills and what does it look like to, you know, pay teachers well or healthcare workers well and what are the in-between steps along the way that get us there? Because societally there's just so much that we'll need to change and evolve in order to get us to that next level. So it feels like we're in that exciting, opportunistic and maybe scary space.

Paul: Completely. And there will be, I'm in the camp of things, we will see, as I said earlier, massive displacement in the workforce. And they tend to put it in four buckets, there will be jobs that got obliterated. In other words, you just wouldn't put human beings on this because AI does it so much better and faster. There will be jobs that are untouched. That's the other end of the spectrum. So think, you know, if you're a dancer, you're probably not losing sleep over AI. Like, you know, AI is not going to do that. But then there's two other categories. It will be jobs that get created that don't exist today or hardly exist. So there are actually about 880,000 data science and AI-related job openings right now. And we'll see that go up because everyone's trying to find AI and data scientists. So those will grow. Now, one of the interesting questions is, will AI get really good at doing those jobs such that we're not filling them with humans? That's a legitimate question. That's not facetious. And then there's a category that's probably the bulk of the workforce, which are maybe jobs that stay today but look so dramatically different that we have a lot of work to rethink. And if I were leading an organization, I'd probably spend a lot of my time on that one. Like I know I have to hire my data scientists, AI people, but I would challenge my HR department to go through and tell me how these jobs are going to change. I suspect, I believe that in the future, big statement here, I'm probably wrong, but being a physician will look so dramatically different and doctors will spend a lot less time on diagnosis prognosis. Like what AI is really good at is prediction. What some would call with Chris Dede at Harvard would call reckoning. It's way better than us already in area after area. What AI is not good at is judgment. The example I use is AI will be much better than your physician at diagnosing your illness and also predicting the course of that illness and also giving you treatment options. And you don't want AI having a conversation with you at the end of that diagnosis saying, God forbid, hey Julian, so you have to go home and have this tough conversation with your family. Let's talk about that. Or how do you want to think about quality of life? Or what are your support systems in assessing what is your resilience? How's your emotional resilience, your psychological resilience? Are you alone in the world? Are you part of a tight-knit family and clan that I know will rally around you? Those are distinctly human questions. They are tied to judgment, right? They're tied to things that AI is not good at. And so if you're the dean of a medical school and you should be thinking 10 years out, I'm kind of like, how does the medical curriculum change? You know, we know today demonstrably that AI is better at diagnosing breast cancer than a radiologist, a malignant tumor. You do not want AI holding your hand and saying, it's okay, we'll get through this together. Like, that ain't making me feel any better, thank you very much. So maybe what this allows is for medical practitioners, health care practitioners, to actually do the thing they're not always great at, which is being human beings. Right? I mean, if you ask, visit like every survey of patients in every major health care system, the number one complaint is, I want my health care provider to know me. That's a human question. No one's saying, I want my doctor to be a better doctor. Usually say, I want my doctor to be a better human. Like stop looking at the laptop and entering data which serves the system and asked me about me.

Julian: You know, Paul, I was even thinking back to your earlier sort of framing comments about the challenges at SNHU dealing with legacy systems. And, you know, there's a part of me that even thinks, I mean, I believe that part of the problem there is similar to the doctors. You know, the engineers aren't exactly trained to be human centric. And maybe we'll have to ditch all those legacy systems or jump them and have engineers that are trained to be much more end user oriented.

Paul It may not be engineers who are writing our code for us any longer. 46% of all new code going into GitHub is written by AI. But it may be that software engineering is a much more human exercise of curating code in ways that put human beings at the heart of things. So we'll see. It's actually a very optimistic and hopeful vision of AI. And my family would accuse me of being neurotically optimistic. So I hope I'm right. I hope I'm right. Because I think it's a small window. I think we have to. I think we have it. Like I don't know if you agree with me, I can see the way we got it horribly, horribly wrong with social media and we did enormous damage to our children and our young people, everybody I would argue, our societal institutions. AI will make social media look like a day at the beach. If you've been tracking the election, recent election in Pakistan, the way that AI was used with false avatars, deep fake videos, voice impersonations, crazy stuff.

Katilin: And then what does it look like to educate people to navigate that complexity?

Paul: And you know, I think this is a series of, I've been trying to formulate this framework. I don't have it quite right, but I think we're in store for what I would call an enormous number of sort of flips when like systems that like operated very clearly in a binary get flipped on their head. So if one is that knowledge jobs which enjoy so much status and reward in our country, whether it's in finance or tech or healthcare, all of a sudden aren't worth very much, we won't want to pay very much for them because the system, the AI system can do them much better and human jobs become status focused on what we pay for. Another flip might be, Kaitlin, that if you think about journalism and the production of information, writers and editors are kind of the heart of the work. Well, when writing and editing can be increasingly done through AI at a very high level, the thing that might get actually the value of that may go down. And in a newsroom, the lowest status star right now is the fact checker, the person who says this is accurate. And in a world where we don't trust anything, veracity checking, if I can use that phrase, actually may go way up in importance. Like, what tools, what knowledge do we have to have? How do we know? How do you build systems that reassure people? So when I look at that story, I have some way of knowing that this is actually accurate and not a creation. And look, Europeans are much more proactively trying to get at this through regulation as well. Like, if you use AI in an image creation, you have to label it as AI created, right? And I think we may, the US typically is more of a Wild West show, so we'll see how we do on that front.

Julian: Well Paul, the higher ed world is very fortunate to have you and your, you know, eternal optimism and brain and experience on the task now of figuring out how do we make this work for higher ed. I guess that's, no, no, I'm quite, I feel strong, I stand behind that wind up our conversation now, how can listeners continue to follow what you're doing?

Paul: No, we've been out there talking a lot about this. We'll increase the right about it. Human Systems as an organization will sort of, we don't even have a website. We're trying not to do what so much of EdTech does, which is make huge pronouncements for what you can do. And then actually there isn't anything under the surface yet. Like then you look like, well, what is it? It's coming, you know? It's like, so we're actually trying to build, like we're actively building what we think is a dramatically different kind of learning platform and we'll sort of unveil that later in 24. We have a lot of partners who are lining up to kick the tires on it and give it a try and I think we have some distinctly different ways of thinking about. So in a world of AI tutors like Khanmigo and others, I think this is a distinctly different alternative if we get it right. That's a big F because it's what we're building is pretty ambitious and hard to do but it's exciting. So in some ways it's a little bit of a stay tuned. You know, we'll again, we'll be at ASU+GSV, which is a big for your listeners who may not know, it's a huge kind of ed tech summit that's become a go-to event in April in San Diego. We'll do a little bit of a reveal there and then by late fall though, by mid fall, we will be testing our first commercial products. And there'll be a lot to see. We'll see how close we get.

Kaitlin: That's exciting.

Paul: It is exciting. I think the need is enormous, as you well know. I mean, we have so many people for whom higher ed is either financially out of reach. It just doesn't work for them. And when we widen the aperture of the lens and look globally, I met with the Prime Minister of Rwanda in October and the Minister of Education. And there, because we are trying to do this global data consortium, they're very eager to participate. But when we describe to them how we're thinking about the learning model, what we're trying to build, I was there to persuade them, could we try? Could we pilot this with a couple hundred users in Rwanda? Because again, we're trying to get this…When you think about learning practices, they look different culturally, right? Like even soft skills assessment. So if we're talking about soft skills assessment in a US context, we're trying to train our students to look someone squarely in the eye and give them a firm handshake. In a Rwandan context, that would look disrespectful if the person on the other side of that is your elder. You're sort of actually downcast and almost literally covering your mouth in some instances. So we need to learn and sort of integrate all of this. But my point in the story was that the Prime Minister's question was not, yeah, we can give you 200 students. He's like, how fast can we have this? We have a national need and we need to roll this out. We can't build enough universities fast enough, physical universities. Which is exciting, right? But it speaks to the like, you know, by 2050, a quarter of the world's population will be in Africa. And there's an enormous need for education. So we're excited about the prospect.

Kaitlin: Well, this has been an amazing conversation. We really appreciate your time, your thoughtfulness, and a window into the world ahead, because I think for so many, we recognize that the change is upon us and navigating the uncertainty is challenging, but I think having an optimistic view is important in it. And it's really been really, really interesting to hear, you know, all of the different resources and materials that you've been pulling together that are framing your thinking around it.

Paul: Well, thank you, Kaitlin. I think of Alan Kay's famous line that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, right? Like we can wait, sit, wringing our hands, or we can get busy and try to do the best work we can, shaping it. I know you have two young kids and I am going to have a first grandchild coming in June, which I'm super excited about. I was like, we need a world that's better than the one we're in for them. And AI could make it a lot more complicated and worse, or it could open up dizzying opportunity. But we need to be proactive about shaping the positive and really mitigating against the negative.

Julian: Well, thank you so much, Paul. It's always so wonderful speaking with you. Good luck with the new venture. It's great things in store, and we look forward to tracking you and to continuing the conversation.

Paul: Well, thank you. I look forward to doing just that. It's so nice to see both of you again. Thank you for having me. I'm flattered.

Kaitlin: Thank you. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.

Lisa Schumacher, Director of Education Strategies and Workforce Policy at McDonald's Corporation, shares her professional journey and the innovative workforce development practices embedded in the Archways to Opportunity program. Lisa discusses the importance of non-traditional career pathways and how McDonald's is providing a range of education opportunities, from English language skill development to college degrees, for its employees. The conversation delves into the challenges and successes of implementing workforce development initiatives within a corporate setting and offers practical insights for employers and their education and training partners. Join us to learn how McDonald's is transforming lives and shaping the future of workforce development.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Julian: Today, we're speaking with Lisa Schumacher, Director of Education Strategies and Workforce Policy at McDonald's Corporation. Lisa has more than 25 years of experience in organizational learning and development, and her current focus is on leading workforce development efforts to provide access for education and create non-traditional pathways to careers, both within the McDonald's system and in other industries. She leads the execution of McDonald's education strategy, Archways to Opportunity which provides restaurant employees an opportunity to learn English language skills, receive a high school diploma, complete a college degree, and access education advising services. In Lisa's previous role at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, or CAIL, as the Director of Workforce Chicago, she collaborated with Chicago area CEOs and managed a business-led initiative that identified and disseminated best practice learning strategies and policies. Lisa was the director of the Learning Academy at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Lisa sits on the board of the National Association of Workforce Boards, is a member of CAEL's advisory board, and sits on the Alliance for Adult Education's board of advisors. Lisa completed her bachelor's and master's degrees in communications at Purdue University. On a personal note, Lisa, I think we met somewhere fairly early on in this journey. I believe it was when you were at CAEL, and I...I'm so looking forward to this conversation. And in particular, I really see you as one of the very few people who has kind of made your way both on the kind of nonprofit side and now and then out of the corporate world and while advancing kind of the missions and goals of both sides in a way that is, I believe, absolutely needed more and more. So I think it's going to be a great conversation and welcome to Work Forces.

Lisa Schumacher: Hello, Julian. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here and have this conversation.

Kaitlin: Yes, thank you for joining us today, Lisa. We're excited to dive into this conversation. And though we just heard a little bit about your background, we'd love it if you would tell us a bit more about your background and how you approach your work.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely, Kaitlin. Again, thanks for having me. So as my bio said, I currently am part of McDonald's global impact function. Just to give you a little bit about my background, I started my career at the University of Chicago Hospitals, which is now the University of Chicago Medicine, I believe it's changed names a few times, and spent actually 20 years there. But the last 10 were part of what we called the Academy. So it was sort of one of the first corporate learning universities that existed and really got my introduction there to, you know, I would say sort of the traditional learning and development, but also taking a step out of that and thinking about career pathways. I'm not sure if we called them career pathways at the time, but we really dug into what does it look like for folks in entry-level roles in healthcare to grow their careers within our organization, within healthcare? Had a very innovative, future-looking chief learning officer at the time. Coincidentally, she came out of higher ed, so she had a different perspective, didn't have sort of that corporate perspective necessarily. And there was a critical skills nurse. There was a nursing shortage at the time. It was the nineties. And so we had to figure out ways to compete in Chicago to get nurses to work at our institution. And our chief learning officer said, well, hey, why don't we grow our own? Didn't really know what that meant. And so we set out on this adventure of looking at our entry-level employees in food service, in housekeeping, in entry-level admin roles to say, you know, what would it look like for those folks to become a nurse? Are there people that are interested in pursuing that career? And then who are the education partners we can bring on to make that happen? And so that's what we did. We brought education partners in-house. We provided pay for folks while they went through the program. And we did just that, we grew our own nurses. And so again, that was really my first introduction to kind of what this looks like. What does upskilling, again, I don't think we called it upskilling at the time, but what does upskilling really look like? And I think I was really very struck by the impact it was having on people's lives. And I think that is the piece that stuck with me. Certainly we were meeting a business need and that was important, but the fact that we were really able to change people's lives, change the trajectory of people's lives by these programs, I think is what stuck with me. And so when the opportunity to go to CAEL, the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning came about, this nonprofit who was really kind and is dedicated to this concept of upskilling and bringing employers and higher ed and policymakers together to think about this concept, I jumped at the chance. And it gave me exposure to sort of the other side of things. It gave me exposure to the policy side, higher ed policy, workforce policy, and this sort of realization that we have these different entities, government, higher ed, corporate America that are ultimately kind of striving towards the same goal, but don't speak the same language. And so don't, didn't, and I still think to a large extent, don't have the ability, right, to come together and have the conversation about, you know, there's a business need. We have people who work in the business. There are people who are underemployed or unemployed. So there's all this opportunity that and just getting your arms around that. And so the beauty of CAEL again was and I think still is as it brings those entities together to have that conversation. And then the opportunity arose at McDonald's pretty, I would say, serendipitously, if you will. And it was attractive to me, one, because it was McDonald's, which seems really cool. And I think two, because I miss sort of that direct connection with frontline employees, which I didn't necessarily have at CAEL. And I missed that from my healthcare days. And so when I came to McDonald's, there was an English as a Second Language program, and there was a desire to do more of that. No one really knew what the more was. And so my sort of ambiguous direction when I started at McDonald's was basically do more of that. We like that, we should do more of that. And so set out on this, you know, mission of first figuring out what more is, and then trying to, you know, sell the business, if you will, on what this can potentially look like for the people that work, the 850,000 people that work in McAllen's restaurant.

Julian: So speaking of more of that, what is the Archways to Opportunity program? Tell us tell us about those goals of the program and your work within it, please.

Lisa: So we launched in 2015. So I started at McDonald's in 2013 in the spring. So it took about a year and a half to two years to really create this thing called Archways to Opportunity, to build it, to work through the process. How was this going to happen in a franchised organization with almost a million people working in our restaurants across that franchise organization? But we launched Archways to Opportunity in 2015. It does serve as our overarching education strategy, as I think my bio says. We designed it thinking really obviously specifically about who are the people that work in our restaurants. And we wanted to create something and did create something that meets them at their point of need and also takes them where they want to go. So this realization that we have people in our restaurants who aren't necessarily ready to go to college, right? My previous experience had really been around college tuition assistance, right? What does it look like? What does higher ed look like? What are the barriers to higher ed? But knowing that everyone in our restaurants that was not the stuff they were ready to take and maybe not the stuff they wanted to take. And so we had to start with leveraging that English as a Second Language program that we already had. So the first component of Archaways to opportunity is English Under the Arches. So it's an English as a Second Language program. We actually just launched Spanish Under the Arches because we have managers and restaurants who have predominantly Spanish speaking employees and they want to be able to communicate with them more consistently. And so now we have English and Spanish language learning. The second component of Archways is around high school completion. We know that there is a percentage of folks that work in our restaurants who weren't able to complete high school for the multitude of reasons that people don't finish high school. I think my third week at McDonald's, I had the privilege of meeting folks from Cengage at the time and Ed2Go, and they have a program called Career Online High School. And Career Online High School has been our partner since the beginning of our choice. It's a program designed specifically for working age adults who did not complete their high school diploma, of which I don't know the exact number, but we're around 35 to 40 million working adults in this country who don't have a high school diploma. And so that has been, they have been our partner since the beginning of our choice when we launched in 2015. We just reached a milestone. We have 2,000 folks who have graduated from Career Unlit High School and received their high school diploma. Importantly to us, this program is a high school diploma at the end of the program. It's not a GED program. We wanted to make that distinction for our folks. The third component of Archways is around college completion. We really focus on accessibility and affordability. By far the most, I would say, popular component of Archways is our tuition assistance. So people who work in McDonald's restaurants, both franchised and corporate owned, have access to $2,500 annually in tuition assistance. And importantly, again, that money can be used at any accredited institution. And that was really important to us because when we started sort of shaping what this was going to look like, we had lots of conversations about the importance of community colleges in this country. And when you think about the population of folks that work at McDonald's restaurants and the population of folks that community colleges are designed to serve, there's obviously an overlap there. So we wanted to really make sure that folks could use these funds to attend their local community college That they had some options, they had some choice, but very specifically, they could leverage their local community college. Our eligibility requirements are relatively low. Someone just needs to work in a restaurant for 90 days and work an average of 15 hours a week, so about two shifts, and they have access to $2,500 annually. Again, that can be used at any institution. Then our managers get a little bit more. Our full-time managers have access to $3,000. Knowing that, obviously, cost is a huge barrier for folks returning to school. We also have under the sort of college completion umbrella, partnerships, national partnerships with schools that offer opportunities for our employees. So our longest running partner is Colorado Tech University, CTU, and because of our long standing relationship with CTU, our restaurant employees can get a two or four year degree at no out of pocket costs. So between the McDonald's, Archways, tuition assistance funds, the money that, and the money that CTU puts in, the scholarship grant money that CTU puts in, there's no cost, no out of pocket cost to our restaurant employees, which is just a phenomenal benefit. The final component of Archways is around advising services. And again, this comes from my CAEL days, clearly comes from my CAEL days, the importance of advising. You know, really understanding that many of the people that work in our restaurants don't know what the first step is, right? I've had this thought of going to school, I've had a dream of going to school, I might be the first person in my family to even pursue this idea, I might not have access to an advisor in my high school or never had access to an advisor. And so someone who can help them navigate the kind of complicated waters of higher education. Simple things like, which I have a high school senior, so not so simple, a FAFSA form. What is a FAFSA form? How do I complete a FAFSA form? To more, I think, in-depth conversations around what's the education I wanna pursue? What, do I need a degree? Is a certificate sufficient? How many hours in a week do I need to dedicate to be successful at the college level? Am I ready to enter at the college level? Or is there things I need to do to prepare myself for that? So all of those conversations, obviously critical to the success of folks pursuing higher education. And so we think that's a really critical factor under the Archways umbrella.

Julian: I'm interested to hear a little bit about the impact on sort of the corporate, on the company side in terms of retention and both for McDonald's own franchises and for the store, and for the franchises.

Lisa: From a goal perspective, so I would say, you know, our big goal that we talk about is overall participation, right? So we've, since 2015, we've increased access to education for almost 83,000 restaurant employees and awarded just under $200 million in tuition assistance dollars. From a company perspective, from a business perspective, in 2020, we did an ROI study with Accenture to really look at what is the impact around promotion and retention. I certainly wasn't surprised by the results because we've all seen those studies and we know that the results are positive, but it was really, I think, exciting to see the results that we got. So we had two, almost two and a half times more likely to be promoted for our choice participants, about 2.3% lower attrition rates, 19% more likely to stay. So we had just some really great results from that ROI study. What Accenture was actually able to do is to drill that down, not direct result, but correlation to sales. And so what they found was that for restaurants that had high participation in archways, there was a 1% bump in sales. And I know that 1% doesn't necessarily sound like a lot, but in McDonald's world, 1% is actually pretty significant. And so it was exciting to see the ability to get that correlation down to actual sales numbers. And so I think the benefit of us being able to tell that business side story, I don't have the dollars off the top of my head of how much it costs to recruit and train a new crew member or a new shift manager. But we all know there's dollars associated with that. And so the ability to say, you know, this person's 19% more likely to stay if they participate in our choices is significant.

Kaitlin: That's fantastic. It's really interesting to hear what you've experienced as far as the successes on the learning side and the business side. Lisa, as we think about designing this program for scale and within a franchise organization, what are some of the challenges and successes you've experienced over time?

Lisa: Great question. And certainly doing this in a franchise organization is, it has its challenges, right? Is different than doing it where it's a, you know, fully owned corporate entity. And so I think that the biggest challenge, and it's an ongoing challenge, is communication, our ability to communicate directly with the folks that work in our restaurants to make sure that they are aware of all the benefits that live under the Archways umbrella. So there's layers that we have to go through to get that message into the restaurants. So I think that's a big challenge for us. Data is also a bit of a challenge for us. So because we're a franchise organization, we see aggregate data. We can see aggregate data by franchisee, but we're not seeing individual data. And so that lends itself to challenges. However, the benefits of doing this in a franchise organization, I think outweigh the challenges. I think the benefit of us working through a franchise model is that we have small and mid-sized business owners who run our restaurants, who run their organizations and they are so closely connected to the people that work in our restaurants. And you have, so then you actually have the business owner who's invested in that individual who is say, going through that high school completion program. And so they really become sort of their coach, their cheerleader, right? They're the person who's hosting that graduation in their restaurant to celebrate that individual. And I think that that has had a huge impact on the success of Archways because the business owner is so close to what's actually happening in their restaurants.

Kaitlin: So Lisa, you mentioned the storytelling aspect of the communication work. Do you have any stories you'd highlight? Success stories or individuals who have had really impactful experiences. We have so many stories that come through. I mean, it's the rewarding work that my team and I get to do and a big part of that is seeing these stories come across our desks, through our computers on a regular basis. A great story that comes to mind because we just had a graduation celebration last week in the Miami area. Jenny Escobar is a general manager of a restaurant in the Miami area. She came to this country from El Salvador, did not speak English, learned English by working in a McDonald's restaurant. When we launched Archway, she heard about the high school completion program. She immediately jumped on us. She was one of our first graduates from the high school completion program. She was then promoted to general manager. She then got her associate's degree from Colorado Tech University. And just last week we celebrated her getting her bachelor's degree from Colorado Tech University. Uh, and the picture, I wish you and your audience could see the picture, but the picture of her and her husband and her four children, so general manager of a restaurant pursuing a college degree. And raising four children, small children, um, just amazing. And so to be able to, you know, see that story, especially because we've seen the longevity of that story, right? It was not a one and done thing. She's still with McDonald's. She's still committed to to her work, to her job, but also pursuing her education is just such a, again, a rewarding experience to see. I mean, we are we're changing people's lives.

Julian: So then what are some of the current pain points? And then what are the steps you're taking to expand Archways?

Lisa: Pain point that I just mentioned, you know, the ability to communicate is challenging. And I think even in fully owned corporate entities, right? That's still a challenge, right? So it's not a one-time message. You know, it's interesting. When we first launched Archways, I had a franchisee say to me, well, I did Our Choice. And I said, okay, great, I don't know what that means that you did Archways. I'm assuming it meant, right, he maybe put up a poster in a crew room or maybe he had a conversation with his folks. But that was a big learning for me to help people understand that this message about going to school or pursuing your education or going back to school is not a decision that people take lightly, especially folks who are in entry-level jobs who have, you know, complicated lives and face lots of barriers to moving themselves forward. And so understanding that that communication piece is such a critical component because it's, you know, somebody who's maybe in the back of their mind has thought you know, I took one college class, I'd love to go back. Or I dropped out of high school and because I was pregnant and I had kids and now they're in high school and I wanna demonstrate to them that education is important so I wanna go back. That's not, again, not a decision that people take lightly. There's a lot of fear involved in making that decision. And so the communication piece, you know, is critical because they have to hear those messages on a consistent, regular basis, right? Until I'm like, okay, I can. I think I can do this now, right? It was an idea and then I got excited, a little excited about it and then I got scared about it and then I got excited about it, right? It's something that they have to hear regularly. And I also think what we've done a pretty good job of is storytelling, right? So really making sure that people see people who look like them and have similar lives to them that have been successful, that have gotten their high school diploma, that have then gone on to pursue a college degree, who have gotten promoted to general manager in a restaurant. Right? Seeing those stories and being able to recognize themselves in those stories, I think lends itself to a lot of confidence. That's, you know, that's work, right? Getting those stories, getting that communication into the restaurant on a regular, on a regular and consistent basis. So that, you know, that is certainly a challenge. I think, you know, the second question you asked Julian is, you know, what's, what's next? Part of it. And I get that, certainly get that question a lot internally. And you know, one of my sort of my flip-in answer is, well, we haven't solved the education gap yet. So we're going to keep doing what we're doing. I think it's important to, you know, stay on course with, with what we're currently doing. Right. There, there, we've had a lot of success. There's a lot more to be had and there's a lot more we could be doing. So I think that's part of it. I think the expansion part is thinking about how do we better position ourselves as a pipeline employer, as the country leans into skills-based hiring and thinking more strategically about skills and the value of skills. How do we, as a company, along with our franchisees, who employ about a million people, how do we think, again, more strategically about talking through the skills that people learn by virtue of working in a McDonald's restaurant. And the importance of those skills, those work readiness skills, power skills, soft skills, all the words that we call them. But they are work readiness skills. They're things that you learn in a first job that carry you through, that stay with you, that are critical in any career pathway that you choose. So really being able to demonstrate, importantly, internally, right? Here are the skills you're learning. And here is how they are transferable as you navigate a career path within McDonald's, but here's how they're transferable as you navigate a career path wherever you want to go, whatever industry you want to pursue. So I think that that piece is important for us to focus on internally. And then I think externally, again, because this conversation has really taken center stage is what part does, not just McDonald's, but what-part do entry level employers play in this skills conversation. And I don't have the answer to that yet. I don't know what that looks like, but I think there is, I mean, I think the first step is just transparency around skills learned in those entry level jobs. And that we stop sort of overlooking the importance of those entry level jobs.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. And actually that's a lead in directly to our next question. And in our discussion today, but, and maybe you can, you can build further on that or go in a different direction. But I feel like, you know, you've shared so many practical steps as we think about how, you know, our audience can become forces in designing scalable workforce development and upscaling initiatives. However, I will ask the question explicitly. I mean, are there other steps you would recommend or specific steps within what you've discussed that you would recommend, you know, as we think about how to take this work broader, deeper that you would recommend to others.

Lisa: Step one is understanding your workforce, understanding what are the sort of individual pain points, if you will, within your workforce, right? So for us, as opposed to, you know, maybe even Starbucks, for example, we had to really think about where are the people along that education spectrum, where are they, knowing that we had a lot of non-native English speakers, knowing that we had folks who didn't complete high school. And so it was important to us to think about what can we design that really helps them along that pathway? We couldn't just start at college tuition assistance. We really had to take steps back to think about, to get them to that point, if that's something they wanna pursue, there's things that have to happen first. And so I think understanding your workforce is a really critical step. I think then also understanding from a business perspective, right, what need are you filling, right? Is there a burning platform? Is there a burning platform around critical skill shortages, for example, in particular roles? Do you wanna grow talent to meet those critical skill shortages? Is there an opportunity to sort of build people up and then allow them to pursue their careers in other industries and other places? So I think getting your arms around what are the needs of the businesses and how do the goals of what you're creating tie into the needs of the business? I think another really critical piece is finding the right partners. We certainly couldn't do this on our own. Right, we are not an education provider. I mean, we do great things in our learning and development space, but we're not an education provider. So who are the right partners? And I think finding partners who are willing to understand your business, and more importantly, understand your employees and the challenges that your employees face, right? That they're not just giving you sort of an off the shelf, one size fits all program or model or process, but they're really willing to and eager to, and I would go as far as to say passionate about, understanding who are the people that you are trying to serve and what challenges can we help them overcome? I think we got really lucky in that, specifically with Career Online High School and Colorado Tech University that they are, they go to events now and there are times I'm like, well, I don't need to be there, cause they're there. Right, I mean, they speak the same language that we do. So we have really great partners in this work and we certainly couldn't do the work without them.

Julian Lisa, you're so clear in your vision and your description and it's all very practical. And I guess it's just a little too bad that technology isn't quite at the point where we can just replicate you and plant you in every corporation in America. But I guess short of that, we're gonna have to keep following you. And so I'm wondering, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your important work?

Lisa: I'm not like a social media expert for certain. But you know, I think the Archways to Opportunity dot com website, there's definitely information on there that gives more detail than I provided. You know, LinkedIn, I try to post as much as possible. I also, you know, I'm happy to, when I got your invitation, I like to share this message. As I started and what my background was, it's really this passion around entry-level workers and they're, you know, helping them navigate their barriers, helping them navigate their careers. So there are a lot of opportunities that I have to speak about this work, which I'm so appreciative of. And so I think a lot of people have an opportunity to see and hear about this work that way also.

Julian: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today and for sharing that passion. It just comes right through the pod. I can feel it. And, you know, really appreciate your time.

Lisa: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Julian. Thank you so much, Kaitlin.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. Thank you. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.

Amy Williams, Executive Director of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP), joins us to discuss the transformative power of dual enrollment in bridging the gap between secondary and postsecondary education and industry needs. With over two decades of experience across various educational sectors, Amy shares her insights on creating sustainable educational systems that are mutually beneficial for high schools, colleges, and industries. This episode delves into the complexities and innovative strategies of dual enrollment, offering a comprehensive view of how these programs are tailored to meet the diverse needs of students and society. Whether you're an educator, industry professional, or policy maker, join us to explore how dual enrollment serves as a crucial tool for developing a skilled future workforce.

Please follow, rate, and review Work Forces on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, or wherever you are listening. Also, please follow Julian Alssid and Kaitlin LeMoine on LinkedIn. Tune in for more insights from the front lines of workforce education and development.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Workforces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Kaitlin: On today's episode, we're sitting down with Amy Williams, Executive Director of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, or NACEP. In her role at NACEP, Amy drives the national conversation about dual enrollment program access, impact, and quality. Drawing upon two decades of experience in secondary, post-secondary, and STEM education, she leverages established structures and fosters real partnerships to build sustainable systems that serve the mutual needs of high schools, colleges, and industry stakeholders to benefit students and society as a whole. Her comprehensive knowledge stems from hands-on experience at every level from the classroom to the campus, the research lab to the manufacturing floor, and the system office to the state house. Amy's work to unite disparate systems for mutual benefit has made her a champion for career pathways and a national expert on dual enrollment. Amy's role with NACEP provides her with a bird's eye view of the ever evolving national landscape of dual enrollment, and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with her today. Welcome to the Work Forces podcast, Amy.

Amy Williams: Thank you, I'm excited to be here.

Julian: Welcome, Amy, it's great to have you.

Amy: Thank you.

Julian: To get us going here, tell us about your background and how you approach your work.

Amy: As I look back and reflect, some of the key elements that have surfaced throughout my career actually started kinda back when I was in high school. Long story short, I had a ninth grade guidance counselor in my high school. We had our usual freshman year meeting that kinda outlines, you know, the courses you're gonna take and how they're gonna support you. And the counselor looked at me and he said, so what do you think you wanna eventually do with your life? What do you wanna be when you grow up? And I said to him, I'm like, I kind of have enjoyed teaching so I think I might wanna be a teacher. And I swear, he said straight to my face, he said, your handwriting is too terrible and you're not very well organized. So what else do you wanna do? And I said, well, I really love science and I've been enjoying science classes. And so maybe scientists and he's like well your math score is terrible. So what else do you want to do? I don't know if it's a testament to so I took a couple different things away from that one That fired me up as opposed to shutting me down. But that doesn't happen for every student I've spent a lot of time in the classroom and I know that you have to moderate your message to try and look at what you're trying to accomplish for students and messages like that we all know across the board are not helpful in my case fortunately, it kind of kicked off a bit of tenacity where I basically said, okay then watch me. And so that led to some intrinsic motivation to really get my act together and start targeting, you know, academic skills, as well as just getting a better lens on what the world of work looks for. So I think, you know, students across the board, we all know they need support, but really they need more than conversations. And you'll see throughout my work history, they need, students need activities, they need exploration. They also need things like validation that they're capable and in different ways. They need to understand more about the careers and what the world of work looks like and how it can be changing, as well as the things that come along when we hit adulthood, like it's really nice to get paid or fairly compensated so that you can make a living. So like that well-rounded kind of look at, you know, at what we're trying to do is really guided a lot of the work that I've done. But specifically, those two professions I picked out, I eventually achieved both of them. So I started out on the science track. I have an undergraduate degree in geology and I have a master's degree in geologic hazard assessment and mitigation with an emphasis on slope stability. So not necessarily the usual background you get in higher ed leadership positions. As I look back, I knew that teaching kind of emerged as a through line in a lot of my work, even when I was doing STEM work. When I finished graduate school, I went out into the field and did field work as a scientist of my type does. But even when I was in an undergrad position and graduate position, teaching kind of emerged and surfaced and in a couple of different ways. I knew that I wanted to get a fellowship to grad school. So I started an undergrad teaching assistant program at my undergrad university that helped give the skills that would demonstrate that I would be a good candidate for a graduate teaching assistantship. Then in grad school, a lot of the grad students, when they came around, they said, okay, who wants to show the students the mineral samples or the moon samples? Not a lot of people's hands went up. I always felt compelled to volunteer for those things with specific purpose. A, we need to ensure that there are gonna be other geologists that take on the problems of the world behind us. So that's an important pay it forward element. B, as a woman in the STEM fields who benefited from some people who trailblazed, but also didn't have a lot of strong women role models, particularly in my undergrad. I had great allies in a lot of our faculty, just not a lot of women role models. I felt really strongly that all students should see someone who looks like them in this work and see how they could be welcomed into this as a practical reality or a career option. So I think that's really important founding in moving things forward. Now, I said I worked on slope stability assessment from the state of Montana. Montana does not or did not at the time have population density in areas that were dangerous. So when I returned back home, you know, finding a job in the area that I had specialized was a little dicey. I did happen to on, you know, chance find an ad in the newspaper for a science teacher at a small private school. It had all of the, I had all of the requirements and I kind of liked teaching a little bit and had done a bit. So I threw an application in. I got the position. I taught for a year, struggled for a year, but finally, at the end of it, really was hooked. Education was where it was at for me. So I taught in a classroom, high school, middle school classroom, STEM topics for a decade, actually more than a decade. They had a vacancy where the headmaster had to leave on short notice. I had to step into administration and I discovered that actually I really enjoyed that element and kind of building systems that work and are sustainable. So you'll see that as a through line as well. And that drove me over to higher ed to jump into a career pathways program with a special emphasis on dual enrollment, which was something they wanted to grow and expand. So I built a program in a small two year college, took that program and really expanded it in terms of number of students participating, number of high schools that were engaged in it, and really tried to put a lot of thought into what we were trying to do with students. So there's another through line as well. And so through that, my work got noticed at the, you know, kind of in the system office realm, as well as in the governor's office, because our governor at the time really had a priority for leveling the playing field for students and saw that dual enrollment was a really impactful tool for that along with others. So I got tapped to basically do what I'd done at a small two-year program and take that approach across the state and did a lot of work to increase access, particularly in our rural schools. Did a lot of work to build up teachers so that they had the requirements needed to take on teaching these programs in the high school, which works really well if you're in the middle of nowhere, which Montana's got a lot of. So those kind of pieces, building access, working on affordability, and then messaging and how this fits into a student's career plan. So in that position with the state, I was the state director of career and technical education and dual enrollment. We put those together to give students kind of this exposure to what was trending in the state and what was evolving in the workforce in the state so they were more knowledgeable. We built in activities like work-based learning, dual enrollment anytime we could, as well as things like you know certifications when they were of value. So really I overhauled the system and tried to join a lot of different pieces together to make a more useful functional program that benefited all of the different stakeholders that were kind of counting on it to deliver for them. After that kind of work was underway and I had worked on my one goal, which was one of the goals which was affordability, we got a one-two free program established right before I left the state of Montana and that gave students the first two courses free. At that point in time I happened to see an opportunity open up at NACEP, which was an organization I had already volunteered for a lot working on state policy because I had some experience there. I threw my hat in the ring, I got the position and then kind of just springboarded to the national landscape where I'd been dabbling particularly in the policy space for a while. And so that's kind of how I got to my chair now and a lot of what I brought forward into that headspace.

Kaitlin: Wow. Well, that is, it's a really fascinating trajectory just to hear your path to this current role. And we really appreciate you providing that context for our listeners. So Amy, this is a big topic today. Can you talk a little bit about what is dual enrollment and concurrent enrollment? How do enrollment, how do we define it?

Amy: So dual and concurrent enrollment, depending on where you are, are terms that either describe very different things or the same things. So terminology is something that plagues our field. But I'll give you the basic breakdown. We're talking about programs. And when I use the word dual enrollment, I use it more as an umbrella term to describe any type of program that college course while they're still in high school, that kind of early access piece. Now there are a lot of different modalities, different ways or structures in which these programs occur. There are structures that are on the college campus where students leave during the school day and come on to the college campus, drop in and fill a seat in a regular section of course of a course. That's one model. Of course, there's online which are courses offered by the college campus. Students can take those in whatever mode that the course is offered from the college. And then there is the most prevalent mode. And that, depending on where you are, NACEP considers and defines that concurrent enrollment. And that is called a high school-based model. In concurrent enrollment and a high school-based model, a high school instructor who meets the minimum adjunct criteria for the college and is working in coordination in the partnership with the college delivers a college course in the high school classroom as part of the regular school day. So those are kind of the three modes either the students taking it online or on campus, in the high school with a high school teacher, or on campus. Now there is an interesting nuance again these things are very complex well not complicated they're very creative in the way they take on some challenges. There are some programs that are based in the high school during the normal high school day that have faculty that come in from the campus and deliver it. You know, those high school based models are the most popular. They're about 86% when we look nationally at the types of programs that students are participating in. 80% are in their home high school and about another 6% are in like a career center or a high school other than theirs. It's also the most complicated model when you try and talk about merging systems and ensuring rigor and integrity and an authentic college experience because you're not just trying to build, you know, in most cases, you're not just trying to build one college course or a couple into a high school. You're basically trying to stand up parts, significant parts of a college within a high school setting. And that includes everything from, you know, how are students being advised? How are we ensuring that they're meeting prereqs or any, you know, gateway scores that need, that are needed for entering a course? So everything from that to how are the teacher and the college faculty working together? Are there observations of the high school faculty with a college faculty? Are there high school teachers that go onto college campus to observe the faculty deliver the same course on the college campus? So there are a variety of different ways to do that, but fundamentally it's not just kind of dropping a course or two in, it is building a true partnership that is mutually beneficial that takes information and navigates it back and forth, all focused on getting the students what they need, when they need, and in the format that works for them.

Kaitlin: So one thing that stuck out to me, Amy, that you shared with us previously is that NACEP is the first and only national organization focused on supporting programs, practitioners, and policies to advance early access to quality college courses for high school students. With that in mind, can you talk about the role that NACEP plays in weaving together secondary and post-secondary learning experiences and opportunities, just because it seems like oftentimes they're siloed, right? And so what does it look like to weave those worlds together?

Amy: Yeah. I mean, you know, specifically in the dual enrollment landscape, really, you are talking about merging, you know, secondary and post-secondary. That's a complex process. You have to not just merge them, but you have to meet the requirements of both, which is something that constantly we have to attend to and runs into some pretty sticky areas from time to time. So it's useful to have a resource to tap in for that. And that's an important role that we play in the field. When we were thinking about what we're doing to weave these things together in just the secondary and the post-secondary space, based on the utility that these programs can have to allow students to start to explore as well as engage in college and career before they even leave high school. That's an additional partner that needs to be at the table. And their needs need to be understood, their constraints, and the kind of the conditions they're working under. So when we're talking about the workforce end, we're talking about really truly uniting three different systems that have highly variable elements. And that's complicated work, which is fine with me. I don't mind the complexity. And I really get excited about kind of the gray area spaces, as well as finding ways to mutually benefit. So, one thing that you have to kind of know about weaving together these things on a national level is that it's complicated. I mean, in one word, if that had if I had to describe what it looks like to do this work, I would say complex. And that's fun, because I dig that space. But you know, like, here's why. And this is why it's important. And there are a few important things that you need to understand about these programs. One. there is no national entity that owns these programs if we use the word ownership. We exist to support the field as an organization. We advocate for their needs. We are laser focused on elevating the importance of these programs and building towards the expertise of the people boots on the ground doing this work. And we want to make sure that their expertise covers best practices in building and managing these programs. So we build work to build national alignment around things like best practices. We work to build a community to share about those things and elevate, you know, issues in that area. And really fundamentally we're trying to come in and add a common layer of common understanding, common practice, and kind of as a proxy of aligning these programs, despite no shared on or national ownership in our way. So these programs, another thing you need to know about them is they are highly variable and there's an important reason for that. You know, they vary from state to state, sometimes school district to school district. They vary in terminology, what they're called. They vary in funding, in availability, in the eligibility criteria for students that get to participate. They vary in their structure, the ownership, how many credits students get to take, which types of courses are open to them, when in their high school career these programs are open to them, and kind of the ultimate objectives. And there's probably more that I'm not even thinking about. And there's a good reason for that kind of high variability. When you look at the history of these programs, which have been around, by the way, since like the 1950s, they really developed at the grassroots level. And they did that fundamentally in isolation from one another. In fact, that's more or less, I would say, the origin story of NAISP as an organization. Several practitioners several years ago, like 20, 25 years ago, found each other on the perimeter of other education conferences and started talking shop as practitioners tend to do, right? They started comparing notes. How do you do this? How do you do that? What are you doing for student advising? What does this look like in this type of space? And so as they started to compare notes, they started to outline a framework for what program quality looks like when you join high school and college together. There are two, I think, points for this. There's the quality control element as well as the guidance standpoint. We don't need people to feel like they have to reinvent the wheel. And then of course, we're trying to align nationally around common language and common practice. So these people started holding professional development events that really focused only on this work. So they weren't a peripheral element, but had their own place to discuss and working to kind of recognize this really unique realm of education and advocate for more investment, more access, and more research as well. So, you know, the programs, I would say those are kind of two key elements. There's no national entity that owns this. The programs are highly variable. And so when you think about those things and the way that these programs work and what they're trying to do, all of that can be really variable. And that means that these programs really are highly contextualized to the environment in which they are born and built. And because of that, when we talk about the workforce side, that actually creates a lot of useful opportunities. But because of the variation in the complexity in the space, the students' experiences with these programs will vary. You might have a student coming out of an early college high school program that was on a college campus. So their entire last two years of their high school, they were on a college campus taking courses, they're graduating with an associate's or some sort of certificate. You may have a student that took one or maybe two courses in their high school setting. You may have a student that participated in a P-TECH and had all of the kind of degree pieces plus an internship on top of it. So student experiences vary and it may be anything in between those kind of ends of the spectrum. And the last thing I'll say that's important to know about our field is that by and large state policy is an important factor that kind of can wag the tail of the dog. Early in the history of these programs, like we know K-12 and higher ed both have well-established statute. They have well-established structures for accreditation and oversight at the state, local, and federal levels. But this in-between space we work has to merge those policies and meet both of them. And for a long time, NACEP really filled that space with a lot of our national quality standards and guidance. But we have seen states and worked with states to kind of fill that gap through policy. And when that has happened in states where that's happened, in states where that's happened, policy is an important factor that drives what programs look like, feel like, and what the student experience looks like boots on the ground. So it's complicated.

Julian: Wow, yes, it sure is. So given that complexity, what are the sort of cross-cutting elements or themes that NACEP focuses on?

Amy: We have a conversation about this every day. How do we make resources that are useful for anyone out there doing this work knowing the variability? I think there are some clear through lines. So one of the things that I talk about with these programs is because they look different, function different, have different purposes, and are configured differently, which is aligned generally to their context and the needs of the people that build them, I actually kind of like to use the analogy of a car, right? Like we know that there are cars, and cars have a lot of different variable components, right? There are different types of cars, there are different manufacturers, there are different trim packages and things like that. That said, when you're playing like Pictionary, you're still gonna draw a car, right? Like there are fundamental elements that you will draw. There will probably be wheels, right? There will probably be a place for people in that. So really we try and tease out those fundamental elements. What is unique and what is standardized? And when you look at those standardized elements, a lot of times they are the functional elements. You know you have to enroll students. You know you have to set some guidelines and parameters on what the curriculum looks like, what the assessment looks like in that course, essentially you are taking a college course into the high school classroom and you want to build a structure to make sure that those students actually have an authentic college experience, they have the rigor and academic knowledge that's needed and meet the learning outcomes and goals related to that. So really our space is focusing on those shared common elements which are pretty easy to tease out particularly at the program level. And really that's where our quality standards live and breathe is because they can be those anchor pieces of what you're going to have to do when you build a program and how you're going to need to work with students. We just add that best practices lens on. When it comes to state policy, because state policy is important and highly variable, we kind of look for the same kind of trends. Most often states will develop policy in this space of a different nature. Very frequently around funding or who can participate or what the criteria to participate. Like, do you have to have a certain GPA? Do you have to be at a certain level in your classes? Or I mean, in your school career, things like that. So we do try and build the alignment around the common pieces. And we also try to elevate and recognize unique and creative approaches that are functional while also elevating kind of where in the context of that program that developed and why they're using that model. So hopefully that kind of gives you some of the key pieces.

Julian: What's the focus of these programs, sort of how do they break out between career tech ed and more general education?

Amy: So when we look at like the data nationally, we find about 70% of these courses that are offered are more in like the gen ed space, gen ed core kind of courses that math, you know, entry-level math, entry-level writing, humanities, things like that. And then we see about 30% as career oriented and sometimes those lines cross as well in some ways shapes or forms. And when you look at those career-oriented elements and what they look like in a high school setting in terms of course content, it might be like adding medical terminology to a Project Lead the Way activity so that students can continue to progress but also get the opportunity to take that kind of college content that helps layer on and support their exploration of the medical field as well as, you know, validate the fact that they can handle college level coursework. It might be doing things like, you know, a welding, taking the welding course and creating a new advanced welding section that's for college credit and allow students to do the welding fabrication. So every high school has a career pathways program. Not every person in a community knows what's offered in there. But career pathways are an outstanding avenue to insert dual enrollment because they are built on multi-dimensional experiences that enrich students, as well as multiple coursework steps that increase their knowledge along the way. And then the ultimate kind of end point of that is really elevating, okay, well, you've taken all these high school courses, let's move you into the next level and do the college one. And so dual enrollment has a very cool practical purpose in that career pathway space, as well as the gen ed spaces. And I think as we look at students and kind of what their appetites and interests are and how those evolve over time, particularly when we hear interesting things in the media about best met and belief in value of higher ed, it behooves students to look at multiple different options and opportunities that are of interest to them and could ultimately result in a good job with family sustaining wages and potential career growth. And we know when we work with higher ed, the types of programs that offer that are really wide and varied. They can be one year certificates that really do a lot for a student and get them inserted in the workforce and kind of business and industry takes over training their own from there on out. Two-year kind of lives in the same space, but also can live in the cool space of packaging onto a part of a bachelor's degree and moving students forward. And we do actually see those in both the more career-oriented spaces as well as the gen eds. And so I think that's an important component to take in mind. Because community colleges do the bulk of this work, they are really ideally very tuned to the local workforce needs and so should their degree programs. So that creates that further opportunity to take that local workforce need and knowledge and what's evolving in it, bring it into the high school classroom, unpack it very thoughtfully with things like a tour to the manufacturing facility or bringing in guest speakers or adding college credits so students can ultimately start on that first path down the road to what's next for them after high school.

Julian: Given the many lessons you've learned through this work over the years, what are practical steps that our audience can take to become forces in advancing college and career prospects for high school students?

Amy: I think my best advice is it falls into two categories. Learn as much as you can and start locally. I think those are really interwoven. I think it's really important whether you're coming from the business and industry side or an institution of higher ed or high school, identify what you want to do and why you are doing it. And there is an important reason for that because of the complexity. Sometimes I will call these programs like a Swiss army knife. Like you can do a lot of different things and they look very different in different states, but it's fundamentally still identifiable. It's a Swiss army knife. It's just a difference of whether it has the scissors and the nail file or just the knife. So, I say that from the standpoint of figure out what you want to do and why, because you can probably work through and build what you need if you're kind of bringing to the table the right resources, bringing to the table the right people, and you're really thoughtful about how you approach this. So I would say build your expertise on what these programs are. We have a lot of resources for you that are helpful for that. You can find them on our resource center. And think through what you would want to do with this, as well as what you can contribute and a timeline. So, you know, then I would look around and find out who else wants to do things like this. I think I, in one of our earlier conversations, I shared a very pragmatic approach that I took to this. I didn't have a line item funding when I was put at the state for this, so I had to get creative. I looked at whoever else in my field was working on something or trying to meet the same objective, which fundamentally was getting high school students more informed about their post-secondary, they're after high school options, right? Found a couple nonprofits that were super invested in getting students interested in college. Worked with them to build like an event and a convening. And now they have taken over some of those things and they run a teacher externship program in the summer, which is something that the state no longer has funds to do. So I think finding other people to help you navigate the space is really important, but that's based on really understanding what these programs are and how you think you might be able to use it. Um, I would say related to that and really important to my first kind of experience with these programs and building them is understanding what the requirements and constraints that each stakeholder is working with. Uh, one of the things that I learned the most in my first year was when high schools roll schedules and when they can add new courses to what they offer in the high school because those timing pieces are critical for when you approach and say, hey, we think you need a health sciences course that might augment your career pathway. Would you like to talk about that and we can walk you through it. If I come to them at a time when they've already set their schedules, contracted for their teachers and listed out who's going to what class in the fall, It's not that helpful time for the conversation. Also in working with some of the business and industry partners, increasing your knowledge and focusing on what you can contribute, but also the constraints of others, is really important for avoiding those foot and mouth moments, right? Where you say something and you're like, well, we could never do that. And then someone says, actually I saw this and they did do that. So I would say, build those connections in a little bit of empathy and start looking for the common wins because that's in my experience where people wanna play is in a mutually beneficial thing. Some things to keep in mind are that, you know, every high school in the United States has a Career Pathways program. It's funded by the federal government. Nearly every student is in some sort of high school setting. So that creates a really cool opportunity where you know where the students will be, when they will be there, and really the details of how you work with them are there to be worked out. That all relies on understanding each other's needs. Deadlines. Things like that. There are some times colleges can't move dates. That's just the way it is. There are times high schools can't work with changes. That's the way it is. There are times business and industry and places in business and industry students cannot be on the floor or can only be there under certain circumstances. So identifying what those barriers are can kind of keep you from running into them after the work has progressed really far. And also being a good partner is incorporating kind of those pieces of what everyone's trying to deal with and get to.

Kaitlin: Well, Amy, we appreciate both the high level perspective of this work and the deep dive into really practically speaking what it looks like to do this work on the ground and some of the primary considerations that practitioners should consider, kind of regardless of their vantage point in this space. As we wind down our conversation today, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Amy: I am not a huge proponent of social media, but I am on LinkedIn. So if you ever want to see what I'm thinking or my opinion or NACEP's opinion, you can find me on LinkedIn. It is where I do tend to, to drop my more challenging thoughts or things to challenge the field outside of our events, of course, and resources. So, and I've already mentioned that NACEP's website is kind of a treasure trove of all things, dual enrollment, dual credit, concurrent enrollment, early college running start, jumpstart, whatever these programs are called in your space and whatever term makes sense. So I think those are two really good places to start. And then I would always say that you can always reach out to us for assistance. We understand this work is complex. And I'm not trying to freak people out and say, it's so complicated, don't go there. What I'm trying to say is that there are options. There is lots of gray space to work in. You might want to, you know, bring a friend with you to navigate those space, or bring a map or a guidebook, and we offer those elements too. But we're always there to be that helpful resource along the way.

Kaitlin: Great, well thank you so much, Amy, for your time today. We really appreciate it. Can't wait to get this episode out to our listeners.

Amy: Thank you. I hope it's helpful and useful for everyone.

Julian: Definitely helpful and useful. Thank you so much, Amy.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.

David Hernandez is Vice President of Education at IPC, a global industry association for electronics manufacturing. David shares his journey from a family of educators to leading workforce training and certification programs at IPC. The discussion delves into the challenges and opportunities in the electronics manufacturing industry, the importance of skill-based training, and the need for a paradigm shift in education to meet the evolving demands of modern manufacturing. David highlights the role of IPC in addressing workforce gaps and fostering a skilled workforce for the future. Tune in to learn about the intersection of education, technology, and industry, and strategies to attract and prepare new talent to build a stronger, adaptable workforce.

Please follow, rate, and review Work Forces on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you are listening. Also, please follow Kaitlin and Julian on LinkedIn.

Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Julian: Today, we're joined by David Hernandez. David is the Vice President of Education for IPC, a global industry association with 3,200 member companies that span all segments of electronics manufacturing, including designers, printed circuit board manufacturers, contract and assembly companies, suppliers, and original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs as we call them, in aerospace, defense, medical, automotive, and other industrial sectors that are reliant on electronics. Dave directly oversees the development and operations of IPC's workforce training, professional development, and certification programs. He also sits on the board of directors for the IPC Education Foundation, whose mission is to help develop a pipeline of new talent entering the electronics industry. David has a strong background in education and training with expertise in developing educational products and programs prior to joining IPC. He was the Director of Education, Development, and Systems at the American Welding Society, Director of Training and Development at an Accounting and Advisory Services firm, and President of E-Baud Consulting Synergy Group, where he analyzed educational needs and developed curriculum. David began his career as an instructor at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, teaching English literature, public speaking, and coaching speech and debate and football teams. Welcome to Work Forces.

David Hernandez: Thanks for having me everyone. And that was a very nice introduction. I like how we ended on football though.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for joining us this morning, Dave. So as we dive in this morning, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you approach your work at IPC?

David: So I started in education as a classroom teacher, right? And I come from a family of educators. My father was an educator, my mother was an educator, my aunt's an educator, my grandmother was an educator, I'm married to an educator. So education was always really kind of fundamental to what we did. And I think from a very early age, coming from parents who immigrated to this country, I was the first person in my entire extended family that was born in the United States. I realized the importance that education provided in helping people advance their lives, move out of poverty achieve the things that they dream of achieving. And so it was not, I think, a stretch for me to kind of dedicate my career to education from a very early start. You know, I started off in the classroom and as I progressed through, I realized that there was an area of education that by and by was largely ignored, you know, in the general consciousness and general conversation around education that really had to do with workforce around manufacturing. And so I...kind of early in my career, I fell in love with that idea. I started working with many associations, eventually taking a role with the American Welding Society full-time, where we addressed, you know, one of my big focal points was addressing the shortage of welders in the United States. You know, at the time that I joined, there was something like a negative growth of welders in this country of 25,000 per year. And so the goal was really how do you start training more welders, bring them into the industry, get them up to speed faster. And how do you bring attention to this conversation? How do you get government involvement? How do you get industry involvement? Things like that. Eventually, John Mitchell called me up one day and said, hey, we need you to do the same thing for electronics. I said, sure, sounds fun. So I came on to IPC about seven years ago or so. Since then, we've been able to really kind of grow what we do in the industry. IPC today is the largest education certification provider in the world for electronics. We certify 130,000 people a year with our credentials. We train twice as many almost. My role really has evolved into trying to figure out how we can address the specific needs of the industry. So my background in education really has hyper-focused me on the idea that in order to address serious and widespread education challenges, we have to find ways to lower education barriers, right? And so how do you make education available to anyone that needs it anywhere in the world at any time? You know, and so we develop a variety of different methodologies, technologies to facilitate that at IPC. We leverage, you know, online training that is asynchronous so that people who need the training at any point anywhere can do it from their phones, from their computers, from their tablets. We have an online, essentially a university with professors that teach advanced courses over multiple weeks to engineers. We leverage, you know, our network of training centers globally to deliver in-person training. And so it's really not about one solution for me or for IPC. It's really about finding the right mix of solutions that help address the problem. And I think that's, again, driven very much by my background. I have experienced education at so many levels and so many modalities to so many different groups of people that I think I just realized very early on that no one solution can solve a workforce problem.

Kaitlin: Absolutely, Dave. And to circle back on one aspect of your background, I mean, your whole background is fascinating, but one thing that stuck out to me as you were providing this introduction was really around your work with the American Welding Society. And I'm just curious to hear you talk a little bit. It sounds like a similar theme from that role to this role is around expanding opportunity and attracting more people to a profession. What did it look like for you to go into a role where you really kind of had a, there was a big gap between the number of people who were needed in roles versus the number of people who have the skills? What did it look like to address that challenge?

David: Daunting any time you look at that. I like to think that I enjoy a challenge, right? And I'm really lucky to be surrounded by a group of people who do the same thing, right? Many of the team members that I have with me today at IPC came with me from the American Welding Society. You know, these are, these is a very talented group of educators, of technologists, of futurists who really kind of take a look at these daunting challenges and say, we're gonna tackle this even if it's one step at a time. With AWS, we had a unique set of challenges that we don't necessarily always have at IPC, which was that to train welders, you really do rely a lot on the kinesthetic aspect of training, right? There's a heavy reliance upon that. But, and this I imagine is gonna be a theme today because it's very much true in IPC as well. Whereas welders in the 40s, it was almost entirely kinesthetic in what you did. It was really just about learning how to move the welding stick, how to move the gun, how to do it at the right speed, at the right angle. As technology advances, your knowledge of the theory of what you're doing, your knowledge of understanding of how X affects Y in the outcome, right, becomes increasingly important. These are machines, welding machines today are hybrid machines, they're not fully automated, although we do have automated welding machines, but they're semi-automated. There's a lot of technology in that machine. It's not just a battery pack with a stick. And so you really have to train welders both in how to do that job, right? How to actually perform the welds, but also to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how the different things like moisture in the air can affect that. How the temperature of what you're doing dealing with the metal type that you're doing, the metallurgy of that is gonna affect the outcome. And so it really was about saying, okay, now we gotta take what is already a complex skill to teach and also teach the theoretical mental part of that to these welders. And so that posed a challenge. And again, very much like what I said about IPC, it's a multi-front solution, right? You're implementing online training to help teach theory effectively and efficiently in a limited amount of time. And you're supplementing that with new technology to help train people efficiently and effectively in the classroom. I don't know that I can claim to have responsibility for anything that has been the outcome of that. I think it's more just, I had a really great group of people that I worked with that both in the industry and at AWS that were incredible at finding solutions.

Julian: It's such a fascinating discussion and also circling back, you know, it struck me early on when you talked about, you know, you kind of developed this particular interest in manufacturing and then this idea of lowering education barriers. I'm in, I live now in Rhode Island, which was, you know, kind of center of the Industrial Revolution, have done a lot of work around the country in the Midwest, in the South, the Rust Belt with manufacturing and boy, that's a pretty big, big lift, especially given that there were thriving industries all over the place that went away and that were staffed by people who are retiring now. And so I'm curious to hear your particular, talk a little bit about kind of the whole industrial shifts and even get, how do you even get people interested? Forget lowering barriers, how do you even get them interested in education when people go and say, oh, don't go there, it's a dirty job or grandpa lost his job at the plant, don't do it.

David: It's a great question and I have kind of a funny answer to it, right? Which is I actually don't think it's hard to do, you know, everyone always makes it a big deal as though it's hard to get people interested in manufacturing. I'll give you an example, right? I fell in love with manufacturing through a very weird kind of series of events. Right? I had, I have three kids. Um, and one, and one of my kids was younger. Uh, we needed to buy them a bed. So we went to the store and we bought them a bed. I put it together and within a year, the bed fell apart. And I was like, this is nonsense, right? This is, I can't be buying a bed every year. This is absolute nonsense. I can build a better bed than this. I have no background in woodworking, zero, right? I, from the time that I was born, I was told I was going to college, right? And I was gonna be a professional. Manufacturing was never even a consideration, right? Now, when my grandparents came to this country, they fled the Cuban Revolution, right? And so they came with nothing. And my grandfather, who was a restaurateur, ended up putting up fences his whole life, you know, the rest of his life. And that because that's all he could do when he came here. And that's what provided us the opportunity. And so when my parents, you know, when I was being raised, my parents were like, you're going to college, you're not going to do that type of work. Right. So one day I said, I'm going to build a bed for my son. And, and so I built a bed and I was like, this is really fun and interesting. And so I started to get more and more into woodworking. And I remember having a conversation with my wife one day where I said, you know, I never considered this a career option. It wasn't even like one of those things where I said, no, I'm gonna go to college, or I'm gonna go into education, or I'm gonna go into something else. It was never part of the conversation, right? And I don't know that I ever would do that as a job, right? I enjoy doing it. And sometimes I think you shouldn't do the things you enjoy as a job right, because then you have to do them, you know, 12 hours a day. Um, but I would have liked to have had that as part of the conversation. So I spend a lot of time going and talking to classrooms and I have for the last couple of decades, you know, and, and especially young kids, and it is not a difficult conversation to have. Right. When, when you go and you talk to a kid about electronics, you can tell them, hey guys, you're going to be working in a white suit in a room under a microscope looking at these little tiny things, you know, where it's silent and it's a clean room and all that stuff. Or you can tell them, listen, you're going to be working to build these things that are going to go on the space shuttle that we're going to send into outer space, right? Or that's going to build the supercomputer that you carry in your pocket, right? The entire modern world is run by electronics. How is that not a sexy career, right? How is that not something interesting that everyone would wanna do? It baffles me, right? You know, it's an easy conversation to have, I think. And I think you can get kids excited about it if the conversation occurs in the right way and at the right time. You know, career days, my littlest one is, this is last year in elementary school and I love doing these career days in elementary school because for most of the career day, kids are kind of staring there like, all right. Yeah, right. I could be a police officer. I could be this. I could be that. I could be a nurse. And they're kind of like, you know, I'm forced to do this. But you go in there with electronics and you start showing them how, how this stuff works and electricity and everything. And it's, it's brilliant. You know, the reaction that you get from people, because it's something that they understand, it's tangible to them, you know, and we're just not having that conversation with people. You know, we're overly obsessed in this country with the idea that everyone has to go to college. And I'm not bashing college, right? I think it's absolutely the right thing for a lot of people to do. And I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to do it. But it's not the right solution to everyone, right? And even if you do go to college, right? Even if you do become an engineer, there's a lot of opportunity in these industries that are just overlooked, you know? Yes, you can go and work for, you know, a firm that does X, Y, and Z, or you can help put, you know, the next group of humans in space, you can help us get to Mars, you can help us solve, you know, the cancer, you know, you can help us cure cancer by developing the computers, they're going to help map, you know, the human genome and all of that, you know, it's about perspective and we don't have the right conversation with the right people at the right time.

Kaitlin: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to hear you talk through how you even frame this conversation and all the applied use cases of, you know, here's how we actually use this technology here, all the different use cases for electronics. And so when you think about the skill needs, and you know, whether you're talking to youth or adults about the skill needs in the electronics industry, what's the evolution that you've witnessed? And where are we today? And where do you think we're headed?

David: That's a great question. So the US is at an interesting kind of crossroads right now. You know, we, for a long time, and part of the reason we have such a big workforce challenge in this country right now, is that we were offshoring so much manufacturing and electronics, right? And we're in the process of reshoring and nearshoring a lot of that manufacturing back. But the manufacturing that we're bringing back is not the manufacturing that left, right? We outsourced at that time, what was low tech, high volume manufacturing, right? And a lot of the manufacturing that is coming back to the United States and that becomes critical from a national security standpoint and things like that is manufacturing that is low-volume high-tech by virtue of the fact that that is the manufacturing that's coming back. We are going to have to change Uh the or the skill set evolves right that is needed There's still a lot of manufacturing work in electronics that is done manually, right? But the semi-manual, right, the hybridization of that technology, very much like what we were talking about in welding, changes the nature of the skillset you need, right? You not only need some of those manual skills, but you also need that understanding of what is going on there, right? What the technology does, what it's supposed to look like when it's done correctly, what does it look like when it's done poorly, right? What are the potential outcomes and issues that may occur? So much of the work in the United States, it revolves around high reliability, you know, or no fail type of electronics, right? You can't have a computer on a plane fail. You can't have a computer that is in a hospital fail. You can't have a chip or a board that is on a weapon system fail, right? And so there's a lot more today that goes into training someone in electronics than there was 30, 40 years ago, right? Just simply because the nature of electronics has evolved. And so like I mentioned a little bit earlier, right? There's a lot more of that theory that goes into it. Beyond that, I think that, and this is an interesting trend that we're starting to see more and more. I'm starting to see organizations in our industry that are not only interested in teaching the specialist that they need today, right? So I need someone that's going to run this machine for me today, but they're interested in teaching that individual as a generalist, right? And I think it's a byproduct of the fact that we scale in very inconsistent ways sometimes, right? You can have one organization that today has to run three or four lines, and by the next six months needs to double the amount of lines they have. And so you can completely retrain your workforce every time you need to make a change, or you can train your workforce to have that flexibility, you know, where you can move people around. The last thing I'd mention about this is, and this is, I think, in particular for, you know, your engineering class, your technician class of worker, technology is evolving at such a rapid rate today. You know, it's exponential at this point, right? We don't have a linear growth in technology. It's an exponential growth. And so the rate at which things change requires that the individual know more on a day to day level in order for the organization as, you know, as a collective to remain relevant.

Julian: Yeah, your organization has, what is it, 3,200 members, did I say? That's a lot of companies. I imagine there's a tremendous variation from some of the really big ones to the, you know, it's open, and I know there are a lot of smaller ones. So given this, you know, kind of exponential rate of change, what are the challenges and then opportunities that you experience, you know, as you're trying to advance the workforce and learning and development and to meet both present and future skills in these companies. I would imagine there's, you know, we could probably, there's several podcast episodes on this, but I'm interested to hear, like, what are some of the really pressing challenges and also opportunities that you see?

David: I'd say the biggest challenges we have is that unlike other manufacturing industries, right? We talked about welding, but you can take anything else, right? Take someone who does HVAC, takes someone who's a carpenter, takes someone who welds and or is a machinist, right? These were jobs that while some of that can be outsourced to other countries, right? A lot of it stayed here, right? It was not outsourced by a significant degree. And so because of that over time we had to as a country develop pipelines for that talent right you can go to a CTE high school today and see a mechanics You know program you can see a program for someone that wants to do HVAC for someone that wants to go and become an electrician Right you can go see someone who wants to work as a machinist or that wants to be a painter right there these programs exist all around the United States. They're constantly feeding new workers into the industry But because electronics outsource so much of this manufacturing at a very early stage in our development as an industry, those pipelines never developed, right? And the byproduct of not having a pipeline that feeds you talent is that organizations who should be building electronics are having to go out and recruit new talent and then train them entirely internally, right? And when you train an individual internally to the way you do things, how much of those skills are transferable to your competition across the street? Right? And so we are in a partially because of essentially what's becoming a regionalization of our supply chains, right? We had a global supply chain for decades, right? Things that were, you know, you had one component built in one country that was shipped to another country. You had a third component that was built in a fourth country that was all shipped to a fifth country. And then that gets sent somewhere else to get packaged. And then that gets sent to somewhere else to get sold to the end consumer. COVID accelerated this idea of regional supply chains and that has really caused a reorganization of the global supply chain, right? You couple that with national security concerns that are occurring around the world and geopolitical tensions, and that's requiring countries like the United States to essentially stand up entire supply chains for electronics internally without a workforce and without a mechanism that could feed that workforce that is needed. And so It just puts additional pressure on these organizations to develop this talent and find ways of retaining that talent. And when you're addressing the problem on a one-off basis, right? Company by company, you may have one company that solves their workforce problem, but you're never going to solve the industry's workforce problem in the region because those skills don't become transferable, right? If I get hired by company A in electronics and I work there for 15 years, and I work my way up from an operator to a technician, right? Is company B, if I move over there, gonna recognize that if I don't have a degree, if I don't have certifications, if I don't have validation of that learning. The challenge that we have at IPC is really trying to solve the immediate problem that we have today, because it can't wait, right? We can't wait five years to solve the problem because we need these supply chains stood up today. We need the workforce today. So we're trying to solve the immediate problem. We're trying to put out the houses on fire. We're trying to put it out, right? And at the same time that we're trying to put out the fire, we're trying to put in the systems to ensure that the fire doesn't happen again. Right, and so you're trying to build those long-term pipelines. That's the biggest challenge that we run into, right? Is that there's, this is not, hey guys, we're seeing that in five years, we're gonna have this problem. Or, you know, we should really address this to ensure this doesn't become a challenge in the future. It's really a problem today and we don't have time to waste. I'd say the second big challenge that we have is that, while I'm thankful that electronics is more and more, in particular after COVID, entered into the general consciousness, right? It's entered into the debate at a national level, right? Government is talking about the need for chips. The challenge that we have is that the conversation is hyper-focused on chips. For context, you know, a semiconductor is often called like the brain of the electronic, right? It's the thing that kind of directs all of the mechanisms internally. But it's only one component, right? A brain without a body is nothing, right? It's a brain in the jar, you know? You need to have the rest of that technology to support it, right? So IPC has this philosophy of what we call silicon to systems, right? You need an entire supply chain, not just one part of it. And so while we've allocated money as a nation to address the chip problem, we're only addressing one problem. So if the problem during COVID was we didn't have enough semiconductors, my concern is that five years from now, the problem is we have warehouses of semiconductors with nothing to put them on. Because we don't have the infrastructure to build printed circuit boards in this country. We don't have the packaging workforce to help package that into a final product. We don't have the components we need. We don't have the assembly facilities to actually put it all together and put it into the box, it ends up at the end user. And that hyper focus of that one segment is I think a significant threat that doesn't get talked about enough. You also asked about opportunities. I mean, I think the biggest opportunity here is for people. You know, these are quality careers with a lot of opportunity. You can look at every challenge as a pure challenge or you can look at it as an opportunity, right? When you have a workforce challenge, that means there are a lot of great jobs that are available today with a lot of potential for them to be long-term careers. There's a lot of opportunity to move up in these organizations, to grow in these organizations. And while I can't tell you much, I'm not a futurist, so I can't tell you what the world looks like 30 years from now, I can almost emphatically tell you it will be driven by electronics.

Kaitlin: Dave, this is tuly a fascinating conversation. And I feel like we could ask so many different follow-up questions. But I'd like to transition us to reflecting on your lessons learned. And I recognize this is kind of an ongoing set of lessons learned for you as you're in this career. But reflecting on your lessons learned to this point, what are practical steps that our audience can take to become forces in positioning intermediary organizations like IPC to effectively drive talent and workforce development because clearly there are so many factors and facets to this work. What would you recommend? Dave: Going back to an earlier theme, we are hyper focused on this idea of everyone having to go to university. Right, there's a lot of other opportunities for great careers outside of traditional, you know, academic structures, right? And that's where I think these third-party associations provide a lot of opportunities for people. And so, part of it is changing the general conversation, right? To say, you know, university is a great pathway for a lot of people and there's other pathways, you know, for great careers. Changing that conversation, making kids in particular aware that there are these opportunities out there and that they're not these dark and dirty type jobs, right? You know, you can go work at NASA, right? I have the benefit of living very close to Cape Canaveral. And so I get to watch launches, you know, almost every week. And, you know, in my life, I've seen hundreds of them. And every time I look at it, I'm just in wonder, you know, like this is amazing. We're putting people in space. We're putting, we have whole space stations up. It's like Star Trek. It's all my fantasies as a kid, right? We're actually living that today. And so having that conversation and making people aware that they can be part of something bigger than themselves, right, I think is really important. And that starts with everyone. That starts with parents, that starts with guidance counselors, that starts with teachers, you know, growing that awareness, you know, and that's something that today everyone can do, right? Everyone can have that conversation. And I think that that is also, and this is, I don't know if this is an ask as much as it's something that I would hope that the people who listen to this reflect on, you know, is that we normalize a lot of this technology, you know, because we're surrounded by it, right? But you really do have the sum of human knowledge in your pocket, right? And taking a second to just marvel at the things that we can do, I think changes that perspective about manufacturing because there are people who built that, right? There are people who designed that. There are people who thought of that and you could be part of it.

Julian: Wow. I think like you, Kaitlin, those two of us looking at each other here, it's like, wow, so fascinating, so exciting. And I love Dave. There are all these actors in workforce development. I think what you're really demonstrating and showing here is the kind of the role that an intermediary, that a business intermediary can play and really kind of try to broaden this whole notion of how do we help people advance their education and careers. And yeah, it doesn't just have to be traditional. I grew up in an academic family, too. It doesn't have to be that, right. I mean, it's a great thing. I also think there's a whole other conversation about how these worlds are kind of coming together of vocational and academic and a lot of what you're talking about. But we could go on. And unfortunately, we're nearing the end here of our podcast of this episode. And so we'd love to hear from you how our listeners can learn more and continue to follow your work.

David: IPC.org is the website for IPC. You know, we have an education site on there that kind of lists out everything that we're doing globally to address the workforce challenges in the industry, all the different programs we're doing, all the different initiatives. You could also follow the IPC Education Foundation, which is doing great work with schools and with ensuring that we're building out these pipelines. We just published a white paper that goes into real deep detail into what are the four major challenges. We talked about one of them today, which was kind of the lack of a pipeline. And a second one, which was that that then forces organizations to become education institutions instead of, you know, manufacturers. But it goes into deeper detail into that, into what IPC is doing. So you can go and check that out. You can follow IPC. You can follow me on LinkedIn, although I think I'm a pretty boring follow. So because all I really want to talk about is workforce. But so that's really where you can follow us and what we're doing. If you're interested in getting involved, we have a lot of opportunities for people to volunteer. We have a lot of opportunities for people to help contribute to the prom. But like I said, you don't even need to follow me. You don't need to follow IPC to really be a part of this. It's really just about each of us changing our individual perspectives when it comes to manufacturing, right? When it comes to the idea that America was a nation that was built because we built things, you know? And that is core to our DNA and that sometimes it's easy to forget that.

Kaitlin: Well, that is quite the way to wrap up. Thank you so much, Dave, for all of your insights and your perspective and sharing your lessons learned and we really appreciate you joining us today.

David: No problem. It's been my pleasure. It's always fun to talk education.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Workforces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.

Connor Diemand-Yauman and Rebecca Taber-Staehelin are the co-founders of Merit America, a national nonprofit dedicated to creating fast, flexible pathways to family-sustaining careers for Americans stuck in low-wage jobs. The conversation delves into the challenges and successes of Merit America, exploring how their innovative coaching and financial models are making in-demand careers accessible to those left behind by the traditional education system. Join us for an in-depth look at how Merit America is transforming the landscape of workforce development, promoting economic advancement through targeted, practical training and support.

Please follow, rate, and review "Work Forces" on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you are listening. Also, please follow Kaitlin and Julian on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Today we're joined by Connor Diemand-Yauman and Rebecca Taber-Staehelin, the leaders of Merit America, a national nonprofit organization committed to creating fast, flexible pathways to family sustaining careers for Americans stuck in low wage jobs. Connor brings rich experience from the worlds of online education and social impact, from co-founding Philanthropy U, leading strategic initiatives at Coursera, to then engaging in global education projects. A lecturer at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, his work has influenced learning outcomes worldwide and earned him recognition from Forbes 30 Under 30. Rebecca brings over a decade of experience working in the consulting, government, education technology and nonprofit sectors. After starting at McKinsey and serving as an advisor and chief performance officer for the Delaware Department of Education, she joined Coursera to lead partnerships reaching underserved learners worldwide. Together at Merit America they're tackling one of today's most pressing challenges, making in-demand careers accessible to Americans left behind by the traditional education system. Thank you both for joining us today.

Rebecca Taber-Staehelin: Thanks so much for having us.

Julian: So great to have you here. And we'd love to just start us off by hearing a bit about the story around founding Merit America and really how do you differentiate Merit America from other educational and workforce programs?

Rebecca: So I'll jump in there. Connor and I each had reasons that took our winding careers to the startup Coursera, a startup that was founded to make the world's best education accessible to anyone in the world from the phone in your pocket, you can learn from the world's best universities. I was brought there having worked on K-12 education in the state of Delaware, coming from a family that valued education and a series of experiences in some of our highest poverty schools in America. Connor can share more, but he was brought there having grown up in Ohio with a family that was also very education-centric and a mother who had worked her way into the middle class through education. And when we got there, we teamed up and were really focused on how we could bring the online courses to anyone in the world so that anyone anywhere could transform their life. And we loved the work that we got to do there, but there was one moment that stood out to us, actually many moments where we were in an Uber one day talking about our work at Coursera and actually talking about some of the limitations, talking about how so many people were signing up for courses, but so few people were completing. And we were seeing that the vast majority of people who were signing up were actually coming from the positive side of the digital divide. People who already had degrees, they already had good careers, but maybe they were looking for a promotion, not a life-changing education experience. And we're talking about all these issues and our Uber driver interrupts us and says, excuse me, sorry, I heard you talking about Coursera. I actually just finished a course and here we are talking about how hard it is to complete. And we're like, yeah, wow, this guy finished. And he said, but then nothing happened. I finished the course and nothing happened and here I am and I'm still driving for Uber. So is there anything that you suggest I do or anything we can do about that? And I'll toss it over to Connor to take it from here.

Connor Diemand-Yauman: Yeah, I think this really drove the point home that access, even access to the world's best content coming from top universities, is not enough. Access does not equal opportunity. And that was a real unlock for Rebecca and me because we were enamored with the idea of unleashing world-class content on the world. But as we learned in that Uber ride, just providing someone access to the content without helping them understand what to take, how to apply it, how to complete is insufficient. And this was reinforced also by another project that we worked on at Coursera that was called Learning Hubs. And these were learning hubs across US embassies around the world where folks could take Coursera courses, take online courses together with the community. And even this light, light facilitation, this light coaching resulted in outcomes going through the roof in terms of completion, in terms of self-reported value of the content. And so over the years, and of Rebecca and I working together and getting to really see the promise and pitfalls of the current landscape and content, we began to see the opportunity to serve folks who needed a little more than just online coaching. And this led to an exploration of a problem that looms large in the United States, which is 53 million working adults in this country who have, most of them have some college, they have a job, but they're stuck in this low wage work with no real way out. And so you asked how are we different from other programs or what are the core facets of our model? So one story of one of our learners, just to illustrate this point, Sandra. So Sandra is a single mom. She's an immigrant. She was working at a Sweet Greens where she worked her way up to general manager. She was maxing out her hours. And yet despite being really good at her job, despite going as high as she could in this job, she wasn't able to get ahead and she wasn't able to make a family sustaining wage. Now, when you think about a learner, an individual like Sandra, there aren't a lot of options for her despite being incredibly hardworking, despite being very motivated to leave that job. She can't go back to college because she doesn't have the time or money. She can't do a high priced bootcamp. She's not able to take long periods of time away from her work or big loans. And so what she needs is a fast, flexible option that allows her to advance her career and build her wealth over time for her and her family. And that's the focus of Merit America. That's how we're different. We are for working adults. We're for folks who have a job, but don't have the time or money to be able to do a higher price bootcamp or go back to school. And we are positioning ourselves. And today we are the largest provider focused on this segment of working adults in the country. Having just served our 10,000th learner, and released a study with UVA showing that our average wage gains for our learners are from about $26,000 starting to $50,000 post-program.

Kaitlin: Well, congratulations on reaching your 10,000th learner and the success rate. That's so exciting. Building on that exact point, actually, Connor, what are some of the successes and challenges you've faced launching Merit America?

Rebecca: When we think back to those earliest days, our idea from the beginning again was, how do we create a pathway to the middle class for tens of millions of people who are stuck in low wage jobs? And so there are a few things that we know we needed to do well, where the current system has had real failures. One is design a program that combines flexibility with support. So you have all of the good of go at your own speed from your home, all the things that online learning has enabled, but you're not on your own. It's not staring into the abyss of, when can I get these things done? So combine flexibility and support. The second is come up with a mechanism that individuals could pay for this, where so many programs right now, they require you to spend tens of thousands of dollars and just cross your fingers and hope for a great outcome, versus really having a model which we've rolled out where you only pay when you get a successful outcome. And then the third is figuring out how to scale it. So create something that is capable of massive national scale. And so, you know, one of the early days stories that comes to mind on this, are we combining flexibility and support in the right way? We set out with a model that said 80% of the learning will be online at your own speed, but 20% of the time will be synchronous with a coach, with your peers, we'll have nudges and all the support. And the very first week of our very first pilot, we rolled that out and we said, everyone has to get everything done by 5 p.m. on Sunday. And as of 4 p.m. on Sunday, zero out of, I think it was 15 initial pilot participants had submitted anything. And we were thinking, oh my God, we're gonna have to go back to the drawing board. 80-20 is way too much online. We need more support, we need more structure. And at 4:09, the first person submitted their materials, 4:15 another, 4:23 another, and by 4:59 p.m., 100% of the pilot participants had gotten everything done. So we realized pretty early on that we had cracked a model of flexibility plus support that could really work for people, second low-wage work. And then over the years to come, we've developed a financing model with similar tweaking to figure out how do you set something up that allows for sustainability while also meeting our learners where they are, and then also designing for massive scale so that as we went from 15 learners to 10,000 and in the not too distant future, hopefully 100,000, we have something that the impact can stay the same because we don't have to fundamentally change the model to accommodate that growth.

Kaitlin: Just building on that briefly, Rebecca, regarding the point about scaling from 10 or 15 to 10,000, what were some of the key, I guess, scaling moments along the way, whether it was technology or certain decisions maybe along the way that guided that scale?

Connor: One of the key moments related to your earlier question, one of the real struggles and turning points for the organization was around COVID. Prior to COVID, we were a hybrid program. Folks were meeting up in libraries or coffee shops with their coaches for about, you know, 20%, 10 to 20% of the program time. And then March 2020 hits, and this program that's doing very well that is predominantly clustered around Washington, DC and Dallas, Texas has to shut down and we are no longer able to meet in person. And this was a really scary moment for us. Remember it was early March and it was our first meeting as a team where we were fully virtual and folks were scared. We didn't know if we were going to survive as an organization. We didn't know how we were going to have to change our program model. And Rebecca and I, we planned this really fancy presentation around the different, you know, the risk register and the different strategies and how we're going to navigate this, this shift and continue to invest in our learners. And I was sharing my screen, my presentation at the time, and I passed it over to Rebecca and I said, you know, Rebecca's now going to talk about the second part of our strategy. And I left my, I intentionally left my screen share on. And so then Rebecca starts talking. And as she's talking, I open up a new browser, I open up Google, and the team is horrified. They're like, Oh, my gosh, just kind of know that his screen is that his screen is being shared. Rebecca and I, we, you know, we had coordinated this. So we were we were doing, but opened up a browser, went into Google and typed in things inspirational CEOs say during difficult times. And it was this moment of just of real laughter and relief and this recognition that Rebecca and I don't have all the answers. You know, we are figuring this out in real time with you all. And it's been that spirit of vulnerability and candor and humor that I think has been really characteristic of our leadership over the years. And that was a real turning point for us both in our model and culture.

Julian: Wow. Yeah. It's incredible to me is how you have built this to scale and how you're beginning to demonstrate that scaling. And I'd love to hear a little bit more, maybe kind of going back, Rebecca, to what you were talking about a little bit earlier. Tell us a little bit more about the coaching and finance models.

Rebecca: So our coaching model is really designed to do three things. It's designed to help our learners complete their technical third-party certificate. It's designed to help them develop the professional development skills they need for a new career, to access and succeed in a new career. So everything from resume writing, cover letters, interviewing, communication on the job. And then the third thing it's designed for is to really help with the mindset shift. And this is something that we saw to be really important in our piloting and early days, which is making sure that our incredibly talented learners know that they are where they are, stuck in a low-age job because the system has failed them, not because of any personal failure. They're there because higher education has become more inaccessible, more expensive. It wasn't really designed for someone to get a college degree while working two jobs and supporting a family. And so they're every bit as worthy and capable of succeeding in a professional career as anyone else. And so those are the three things we focus on. And I can share more about, you know, the logistics of how we do it. We've got there's small group coaching, there's large group coaching, there's on-demand coaching, there's nudges. You know, everything you think of when you hear coaching is in our coaches toolkit. But one of the more important learnings over time has been we don't think if we were selling a coaching program, if it was come to Merit America for best in class professional coaching, most people wouldn't actually sign up for that. They come to us because they want a data analytics certificate, IT, cybersecurity, UX, Java, project management, all the tracks that we offer. But when you ask them on the back end what they valued most in the program and what was most essential for making that shift from the $26,000 pre-program wage to the $50,000 post-program wage that we saw with our study with UVA, they all say it was the coaching. So we really actually see our technical tracks as the Trojan horse for this coaching. And if there's anything our listeners should think when they hear Merit America is coaching at scale to help people stuck in low-wage jobs access great upwardly mobile careers.

Kaitlin: Well, and so building on that point, I'm wondering...you talked a little bit about that report. When you think about measuring success of your program, what are some of the metrics you pay attention to as you've scaled? And what are the metrics you'll continue to track, I guess, as you said, you hope to reach 100,000 learners, right? What are the things that are top of mind for you?

Connor: When we think about outcomes measurement, we try to really ground ourselves in the perspective of the learner as a consumer and have real empathy for how difficult it is to make a decision in the current higher education and workforce landscape. This is the only industry where folks are asked to make the largest purchase of their lives for a product they don't know if they will get, which is the certificate. They don't know if they're gonna complete, and most of them won't. It's a coin toss if they will. And then even if you get the product, after years of time and money, you don't know if the product will work. You don't know if that degree is actually going to get you a new upwardly mobile job or increased wages. And so when we think about that experience as a consumer, we want to take the risk away from our learners. And that starts with how we measure success and impact. Specifically, our North Star at Merit America is near-term wage gains. We wanna know what were folks making before they started Merit America and what are they making in the months after completion? This is a metric that we cannot fudge. It is very difficult to cook the books. And this is why we have set out from the beginning to be the first nonprofit unicorn driving a billion dollars in wage gains back into the economy through the pockets of hardworking Americans. And we're hoping that by working with policymakers and other companies and workforce development agencies and organizations that we'll be able to have a more ROI-focused transparent set of metrics that can guide the overall system.

Julian: Rebecca, would you also please tell us a little bit about the finance model.

Rebecca: So when we set out to build our financial model, we know we wanted to do two things. We wanted a model that could scale, that would not require us to rely entirely on philanthropy or sources that have limited other organizations from scaling in the past. And we wanted a model that was so incredibly transparent and learner friendly that we could set a new standard for what it looks like to finance post-secondary education options. So what we designed was a model by which learners pay nothing to go through Merit America, but they sign an agreement and that agreement says if and when they are earning above the salary threshold, they'll pay back fixed monthly payments up to a total cap. It's about $95 a month for most tracks, up to $5,700 across five years. So you're looking at paying a little more than $1,000 a year if you're successful at a time when our successful learners are showing an average one-year wage gain of about $24,000. So the goal in doing this was to say, how do we create a way to de-risk this? Our participants are already investing their time in Merit America. How can we make it so they're not also investing their dollars unless they have the outcome that they are looking for? And we're excited that this model has been so successful and so learner friendly that actually one of our biggest issues now is folks think it's a scam. They think it's too good to be true. And if you Google Merit America, you'll see some Reddit threads with people saying, is it a scam? Is it legit? And so part of what we have to do is say, no, it's real. We're doing this because we are a nonprofit. We care about this mission. And we wanted to create something that was unlike anything that exists otherwise.

Julian: So recognizing the fast pace, ever changing nature of work, what's your approach to continuously improving Merit America and remaining aligned with the workforce opportunities?

Connor: I think there are a few ways that we think about this. And the first is really grounded in our values and how we can, as an organization, be incredibly dynamic, fast-moving, and experimental, as fast-moving and dynamic as the labor market into which we are placing our learners. And that means that we are having to constantly reinvent ourselves with our level of growth. I mean, we were 15, serving 15 people about five years ago, and we are now just having served our 10,000th learner. And this means that every few months, we are like a snake that is shedding its skin and reinventing our work, how we do it, and continually changing while doubling down on our culture and those values and the aspects of our model that we believe are, have been and will continue to be our core differentiators. And that specifically is our coaches. Our coaching is our secret sauce. It has been the secret to our success from the beginning. And so while we are continually reinventing ourselves and our model, it's also doubling down on the things that are working in our core to our work. And coaching is number one on that list, but it is a, it's a, it's a very fun struggle that will never end. Rebecca and I were talking about the quote yesterday. It doesn't get easier. You just go faster. And that's really what it feels like as we continue to do this work and grow and hit levels of growth that really haven't been achieved in our space today.

Kaitlin: Your comments about the coaching model really stand out to me and ring true to me just based on the experience that Julian and I had working at Southern New Hampshire University around their competency based model and just that the coaching piece is, I think, just such a huge element of how this works well. Like there's the content and there's offering these different programs, but then it's like, how do you reach people, as you've said, where they are, and truly help them along their individual barriers or obstacles or points of pain? And so I really appreciate your acknowledging that, and also recognizing that as you scale, there's always kind of new obstacles, but that you're seeing excitement at every stage of this. It's really exciting and inspiring to hear. As we transition toward the latter half of our podcast today, I'm wondering what are some practical steps our audience can take to become forces in the future of work and learning from your perspectives?

Rebecca: Early on in our journey, we spoke with a social entrepreneur who actually had started an amazing organization in Africa and is now leading a major nonprofit herself. And, I remember her early advice was become obsessed with the problem you are trying to solve. Know it better than anyone. Stay super close to the people you are trying to support and really understand what their experience looks like and how you can design for them. And I think the, ultimately when we look at what has led to Merit America's success, it's this deep, deep empathy for and connection with the learners that we work with who not only are participants in our program, but are also our teammates. We have double digit percentage of our team, our graduates of our program. We've got an alumni council, so their voice is in everything we do. So I think that's principle number one. The second thing that's really served us is making sure that from the onset we were designing everything from scale. So while we were doing things with 15 people that obviously you can't do with 10,000 people, making sure that there was a clear through line for how that program could get to 100,000 people so we didn't face the cliff that so many nonprofits face where they've done something that works with a couple dozen or a couple hundred people and then they have to completely reinvent the model again for thousands or tens of thousands. And I actually remember with that first 15 person pilot, when it came time to match the learners with their coaching groups, we had them all send us their schedules and I have a video of our first teammate, you know, printing out and lining up all the schedules to figure out, okay, it's six to eight p.m. on Tuesday night, a good time for everyone to meet. And at that moment, she turns in dead bands to the camera, this will not scale. And it was a funny moment because it just showed how in everything we were doing, we're constantly figuring out, well, which aspects of this do we need to automate, design technology and processes for, while again, making sure that that core intervention, a coach with a small number of learners, supporting them on their learning journey was designed for the national impact we wanted to have.

Julian: It's interesting as you're speaking, Rebecca, I'm thinking that as we've been doing this podcast and having this sort of listening tour with leaders around the country, it seems to me that a lot of the scaling is really coming from new organizations that are kind of building it from scratch. What lessons can sort of the legacy organizations learn from you? What can universities and colleges and some of these bigger, more established places learn from this little engine that could?

Rebecca: One funny memory from our early stages, we actually tried to do this from within Coursera. So we knew that online learning is a huge part of this work and we wanted to see other nonprofits take what we saw with those learning hubs and other experiences and create programs that were high quality, accessible and scalable. And we were working with one major nonprofit and trying to encourage them to do a pilot of this new approach that could be much more scalable and more accessible. And I remember sending my fifth follow-up email to them and getting a reply that said, minus Rebecca, this feels a few years away from where we are. So they thought they took me off the thread, but they had actually kept me on. And that was just such a good moment. I had such empathy for organizations that are out there that it's really hard to take what you're doing, keep the trains running day to day, but also have these big swing experiments of new ways to do things. And yet I think that is the surest path towards success. So figuring out, how are you constantly carving out a chunk of your time and resources and talent to identify new models that can be as impactful, if not higher impact, more scalable, more affordable, and most importantly, better designed to meet the needs of our users? So the colleges and universities that we think are gonna win the war on talent and enrollment and completion are those that don't just keep up with their 10-year strategic plans, but are looking around and saying, what can we learn from entities like Merit America? We'll be...We're an open book. What you can learn is coaching really matters. If you design a program around coaching and around flexibility, you can see tremendous results in the metrics that matter most. So that would be our overarching advice.

Connor: Yeah. And like we were saying before, center on the learner. Really try to understand what are the problems that they are trying to solve and don't operate from a place of what do we have or what can we provide based on our current structures and faculty, and instead re-center on what do they need. And I think if we were to all center on the needs of and the challenges of folks across this country who want better jobs, who want higher wages, I think every workforce and higher education system would be a lot better off.

Kaitlin: So as we close out our podcast today, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Connor: Easiest way to learn more is to come onto our website. If you want to be a STAR student, we highly encourage you to sign up to be a volunteer interviewer. So all of our learners have to go through mock interviews with folks from our community. And it's such a great way to give back, to meet some exceptional working adults who are on this journey and to learn more about our work. And of course you can reach out to Rebecca or me directly through all the channels. But we are always eager to chat with anyone who is as obsessed with this problem as we are.

Julian: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, and we too will look forward to tracking Merit America and your important work.

Rebecca: Thank you.

Connor: Thanks for having us.

Kaitlin: Thank you so much. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We are also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.

John Colborn is Executive Director of Apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to advancing apprenticeships as a viable pathway to expand opportunities for American workers and employers. John shares his extensive background in workforce development and his holistic view of economic opportunity, emphasizing the importance of education and skills training. The conversation explores the historical context and current state of apprenticeships in the U.S., highlighting the need for increased investment and a supportive ecosystem to enhance the apprenticeship model. Join us as we offer an in-depth look at how apprenticeships can serve as an alternative to traditional college pathways, promoting economic advancement through practical work experience and structured learning.

Please follow, rate, and review Work Forces on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you are listening. Also, please follow Kaitlin and Julian on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: We're very excited to announce that Work Forces has its own home, workforces.info. Please check out the site and join our growing community. Now, let's dive in.

Julian: On today's podcast, we're sitting down with John Colborn, Executive Director of Apprenticeships for America. AFA is a new national nonprofit, advancing apprenticeship as a model to expand opportunity for America's workers and employers. Prior to this role, John worked as a consultant at the intersection of workforce development, human services, and educational achievement, and supported clients including National Trade Associations, philanthropy, and workforce and education nonprofits. John also served as chief operating officer at JEVS Human Services, a multifaceted nonprofit organization serving the greater Philadelphia region. In this role, he oversaw the organization's efforts to enhance opportunities for 25,000 plus young people and adults annually. John has over 30 years of experience with community-based and national nonprofits, including the Aspen Institute, Ford Foundation, and Philadelphia-based Reinvestment Fund. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you for joining us today, John.

John Colborn: It's great to be here.

Kaitlin: Yes, John, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on this podcast with us today. And though we just gave your bio, we would love to hear more about your background and how you approach your work in your own words.

John: My entire career has always been about advancing opportunity. And I've done that in a variety of contexts. I've done that in local contexts, working at the neighborhood level and community level. I've done that at the national level. And I have to say, I went through a certain evolution in my own thinking about economic opportunity. I started really thinking about place-based strategies and how communities and neighborhoods can seek to find economic opportunity for the community and for the residents there. But over time I really came to believe that we could build nice houses and people could still be poor. We could build great neighborhoods but people could still be poor. And the real key, at least in my thinking, towards building economic opportunity is about giving folks or providing avenues for folks to get the education, skills, training, and economic opportunity they need to be able to earn a decent living. And so that's really been the focus of my entire career. And it's just been a privilege to be able to do that in various contexts.

Julian: For level setting, and for our listeners, what are apprenticeships? And what's the state of play of apprenticeships in the US historically and present day?

John: Apprenticeships are not a new idea. In fact, they're a very old idea. They go back to America's founding. George Washington was an apprentice surveyor. We've had this notion of earning and learning together from the very, very beginning. But unlike other countries, we haven't really developed that into a formal structure for how people can advance in their careers or how young people can enter the labor market. We've just lagged behind. The one place that we've done that pretty effectively has been in the trades. And so when I'm speaking to people about apprenticeship, and I asked them, what's the image in your mind? Most people will say it's my plumber, it's the contractor I brought in, it's the carpenter who's doing work on a job. And indeed that has been the focus of a lot of our apprenticeship work in this country for a long, long time. But in the last 10, 15 years, there's really been a renaissance in thinking around apprenticeship. First off, thinking about apprenticeship as a tool that can be used in many different industries and many different occupations, really taking a page from the experience of other countries. And then also recognizing that apprenticeship offers an alternative to a sort of college-only approach to the on-ramp to careers and to occupations. And so those two things together, I think, have really encouraged folks to get a second look at apprenticeship. Now let me just say apprenticeship can come in many different shapes and sizes but let me give you the official registered apprenticeship definition. So first off apprenticeships are a job. They're not a training program, they're a job and so when you're engaged in an apprenticeship you're getting a paycheck, you're expected to work, there's probably a schedule associated with that, and at growing levels of capacity as your skills grow, you will be contributing to the organization that's hired you. The second thing about an apprenticeship is that it's really built on two learning approaches. The first is learning on the job. And so that's really about having a structured way to be able to use the experience that you're having at work to build the skills and capabilities you need to be successful. And then also a classroom component. So recognizing that not everything necessarily can be learned on the job, there's probably a theory or other kinds of skills that can be built in a classroom. So it's a job, it's education at work, it's education in a classroom, and then generally apprenticeships are set up with a mentor in mind. So the idea being that seasoned and experienced workers in that occupation can offer avenues to be able to support and nurture the ability of the individual to be successful. And then the final key definition of a registered apprenticeship anyway is that there's a path of wage progression through the apprenticeship program. So you might start at a lower wage than a seasoned, already skilled individual in a particular occupation. But eventually you will grow over the course of the apprenticeship, generally a year or two, sometimes a little longer, to a wage that's equal to that seasoned and trained worker.

Kaitlin: Great. Well, thank you so much for providing that introductory overview of the world of apprenticeships in the U.S. I'm wondering, if we broaden or take the lens out a bit and think about international examples, what are some best practices you're seeing in the apprenticeship space? How can we draw upon them or how are we drawing upon those examples in the US now?

John: Apprenticeship for America is really founded with the idea that we have this great idea, this great practice that has not scaled in this country. And part of the founding of the organization was really an analysis of what was holding the United States back from having the same kind of market penetration, the same kind of opportunities available for people in apprenticeship that other countries offer. And really, there's, I don't mean to oversimplify it, but really there's sort of three things that rose to the top in that analysis. The first is that every country that has significantly grown its practice of apprenticeship has invested in apprenticeship. And in the United States, we are woefully under-invested in apprenticeship. For the last 50 years, we've really decided that college was the way for people to find economic opportunity. And we've invested heavily in it, but we've under invested in other pathways to the point now that we invest about a thousand to one in terms of college versus apprenticeship support. We invest in individual college students at the rate of $50 for every dollar that we invest in apprentices. So with that imbalance, it's not that surprising that we've ended up with a nascent or underperforming apprenticeship sector. The second thing that's really been central to the growth of apprenticeship in other countries has been a set of institutions and organizations that really create an ecosystem around apprenticeship. This notion that an individual employer will fill out all the forms, put into place the educational programs, find the structures for mentoring, build the skills and capability matrix that they can measure an individual apprenticeship, apprentice against, design the wage progression plan, do all the things that are necessary to run an apprenticeship. It's just not realistic. Employers have businesses to run. And so what has developed in other countries is a set of organizations that really help businesses through those kinds of challenges and then are also specialized in working to ensure that apprentices are successful in their apprenticeship. And so building out this network of apprenticeship intermediaries is really central to the growth of apprenticeships in the United States. And the third thing is that we have a fairly limited view of what apprenticeship can and could do for this country. And so we have a communications challenge and that's a communications challenge that extends from policymakers to employers to workers to parents of young people entering the labor market. There are a series of challenges that we have in terms of being clear about exactly what the opportunity can be. And so those are really the three things that define the work of Apprenticeships for America, and we think will be necessary in order to grow apprenticeship.

Kaitlin: So building on that last point, John, I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the cultural shift associated with moving toward apprenticeships. I know you mentioned a communications challenge, but it seems like part of it's also how we think about apprenticeships. And when we think about the various pathways that are afforded to Americans to, and frankly, learners throughout the world that were focused on the US in this conversation. What are those pathways that are available and the fact that there are so, there are many and that there should be many. I'm just curious, you know, what you're thinking about there or what you're seeing around that cultural shift.

John: Yeah, absolutely. And there is something new out there, right? I think that there's a little bit of disaffection with the current higher education, so traditional higher education system that's been driven by a sense of overwhelming costs that leaves people in debt, or, and or, driven by a sense that the learning and the educational experience that people are getting in higher education is not necessarily relevant to their careers or their earning capabilities going forward. And so that level of disaffection has, I think, led people to look, oh, and I should say one other thing, is that there's just a fundamental inequality that's built into our higher education system. As much as we try to build more equitable systems within higher education institutions, we end up with an economic sorting that happens through our higher education system. And so with all of that sort of at play, I think policymakers, workers and employers are starting to ask, you know, what's the alternative? Are there ways to get to this economic opportunity objective without leaning so heavily on a college-only approach. And by the way, I should just say, I think somebody who wants to go to college should absolutely go to college. I think everyone should have an opportunity to pursue the education and careers that they aspire to. But I don't think we should be limiting folks to one path or another. I think providing people multiple paths is the surest way to be able to advance economic opportunity. So I think the table in some ways has been set around looking for alternatives. And there's another dynamic at play, which is that the nature of work and how hiring happens in this country has shifted. When I started in workforce development, you could plausibly sit down with a couple of employers, you map out what their skill needs were, you design a six week or 12 week or 16 week training program. And if you did the training right and you had the right relationships with employers and a little bit of support for folks once they got their job, you could have a successful workforce development program. Today, if you look at entry-level jobs, those entry-level jobs that I was trying to do that training for, often those entry-level jobs actually ask for experience. And so the notion that you could sort of, that you would build that experience on the job has shifted folks who have that background and experience. And of course, you know, apprenticeship is a good way to answer that problem because building experience is built right into the apprenticeship.

Julian: Absolutely, John. And you talked a little bit earlier about Apprenticeship for America's role. Can you dig a little bit deeper there? Like, you know, you're a new organization. I think people will be very interested to know what you're up to. I mean, I had the opportunity to attend your summit a few weeks ago, which was incredibly well attended and clearly, clearly fulfilling a need because there were folks from all over the country and national players. And so, you know, clearly there was a convening component to it, but I'd love to hear more about, you know, what you're up to and your plans.

John: Yeah. So, I mean, I think that that community of practice is really critical because if you remember, one of the things we identify as a need is building out these apprenticeship intermediaries and providing a community of practice for that group is absolutely central. At that conference, which was our first, and first of a series, we hope, the thing I heard over and over again is that there had never, that folks had never found a forum that was quite like this one. It was not just about how great apprenticeships are, that's a great thing, and we've all been to conferences, I've been to many conferences, where we've had the great introductory Apprenticeship 101 conference and what to do with it and why we should be doing more of it. But also now, how do we do it? How do we do it better? What are best practice approaches in apprenticeship? What are the operational constraints that we're grappling with? What are the particular sectoral contexts for how apprenticeships can be deployed in healthcare, in manufacturing, in IT? And that's just a conversation that's been hard to find elsewhere. And so providing a space for that, as well as building out a support ecosystem for the nation's apprenticeship intermediaries is a central piece of what Apprenticeships for America is all about. But that first thing that I said was our major barrier to the growth of apprenticeships, which is a public support strategy, is really our number one mission. And so we see ourselves working at the federal level and in states to help design and act and implement policies that are supportive of apprenticeship. And I should just say that can take many different forms. You know, probably our central tenet is really the idea that there should be a paid for apprenticeships funding system. So we're not constantly putting together apprenticeship programs that depend on two and three-year grants that come from the state government or from the federal government, but there is a regular and predictable funding mechanism that supports apprenticeships in the same way that we've designed our funding for higher education. You don't go to school with a, well, actually some of us do go to school with two-year grants and then try to figure out how the third and fourth year are gonna get funded. But certainly the colleges and universities are not funded that way. They don't open their doors with two years of funding and then hope that there's gonna be funding to graduate people. So we need that predictable funding mechanism. But there's a whole series of other things, supports for employers who are engaged in apprenticeship, using the power of government to encourage apprenticeship among its own workforce and among contractors, ensuring that there's alignment between workforce development, education, systems to support apprenticeship activity, connecting apprenticeship to industrial policy like our CHIPS Act to make sure that we're using apprenticeship and in ways to build the talent that's necessary to drive critical industries in this country. There's a whole range of different things that are out there that are going to be critical to the growth of apprenticeship in this country. And we seek to advocate for that identify those those opportunities and advocate for them.

Julian: John, are there particular models that you're excited about?

John: So let me look internationally, and then let me look domestically. So on the international side, I think while we're still really looking to learn more about apprenticeship, we know that in countries that look a lot like ours, and let me just say parenthetically, there's been a lot of looking at the Germanic apprenticeship systems. And they're great. They're amazing. But they're also rooted in a set of industrial arrangements that just we don't have here. And it's really hard to sort of conceive of how you take some of the Swiss or the Germanic models around apprenticeship and lay them down in the United States. But in countries that look a lot more like us, we're seeing how a concerted investment effort and a prioritization around apprenticeship can have dramatic results. And so whether that's in England, in France, where the implementation of apprenticeship had a measurable impact on youth unemployment rates in that country. In Australia, we have seen these countries investing in apprenticeship in Canada. We are seeing countries invest in apprenticeship and get much better results than we get here in the United States. That being said, there's certainly pockets of opportunity and innovation going on here in the United States. So we in particular are very excited about the Apprenticeship Innovation Fund in California, the first really scaled pay for apprenticeship effort that's out there and that provides operatives of apprenticeship programs with the kind of predictable funding mechanism that we've been advocating for. And California's early experience there has been really helpful in terms of looking at how to design those programs and at the potential impact that they can have.

Kaitlin: Great. It's really helpful to hear what you're seeing and what you're drawing from and is around best practices and models that we think we can learn from as this movement continues to grow and expand. Based on your lessons learned in this space, John, what are some practical steps our audience can take to become forces when it comes to apprenticeships?

John: So the first thing I would just say is that there are many pathways for different kinds of institutions to engage and support the development of apprenticeships in their communities. So whether you're a workforce board or community college, a workforce development practitioner, an employer, a labor union advocate, a community developer. There's many different ways for folks to engage in apprenticeship. I think that the first thing that I would say is start with the notion that short-term training programs, the sort of train and pray approach, and the college-only approach to economic opportunity are not the limited horizon that we have to work with. That there are many different ways to think about engaging in that and that apprenticeship appropriately should be one of them. Not for every institution, not for every, I should say not for every industry and every occupation, but I think it's a tool that's worth learning more about and a tool that's worth exploring in particular contexts. That's sort of number one. Number two is to make sure that the institution that you're operating in is building an environment where apprenticeship can be one of those tools you're providing. So if you're in a community college, you know that you can be a really critical part of that classroom experience in apprenticeship. And maybe even more, we're actually just doing a study with some of the leading community college practitioners in apprenticeship right now. And they are engaged in a wide range of supportive activities around apprenticeship. If you're a workforce development board, we've seen over and over again the power of boards to be able to use their convening power to organize employers and to focus attention on opportunities for apprenticeship, to be able to use their one-stop systems as recruitment tools for folks who might be appropriate for apprenticeship programs, and then to be able to use their funding mechanisms to be able to support apprenticeships. Again, because of the way they're funded, it'll be the short-term funding that we're not big fans of, but is really part of the pump priming exercise around apprenticeship. And then, of course, if you're an employer and you're experiencing talent challenges, to look at apprenticeship as one way to address some of those challenges. And I'll just say, I think, as we are moving forward towards a world where there are, a country where there may be more apprentices in the United States, we're gonna need a lot of these apprenticeship intermediaries out there. We suspect we're gonna need something on the order of four or five times the number we currently have. And if that's gonna be the case, then I think it's appropriate to learn more about what apprenticeship intermediaries can do, and to think about whether that's an appropriate business model for your organization.

Julian: So John, just as a follow up there, can you speak a little bit more? There was a lot of talk about apprenticeship intermediaries at your summit. You know, Ryan Craig in Apprenticeship Nation has written quite extensively, drawing a lot on the work that's been done overseas. Can you just speak? And I know that they kind of come in various shapes and sizes and different types of organizations, service intermediaries. Can you give sort of a one-on-one overview of what that even means?

John: And I should say we are not at all doctrinaire about this. There's not one way to do apprenticeship intermediaries. Context matters a lot, depending on the environment you're working in, the industry you're working in, all of that. But there seem to be a set of functions, core functions, that really do work to enable apprenticeship. So the first is an organization that can be a solutions provider for the employer, who can help with conceptualizing and designing what apprenticeship might look like, who can help with the registration process around apprenticeship, who can help connect apprentices with the training providers that are part of that classroom instruction piece, and who can help with the administration and tracking of apprentices through the program. Many times these intermediaries operate in what's called a group apprenticeship structure, which means that they register one apprenticeship with the Department of Labor, with the state, and then they bring multiple employers into that apprenticeship program. And in that way are able to sort of spread the cost of that apprenticeship over multiple employers. So that's the most common way that apprenticeship intermediaries operate. And then I should say there's a further level of apprenticeship intermediary that's out there, what we call the high intensity or high intensity apprenticeship intermediary. And these folks not only take on the design and development of apprenticeships and help manage them, but they actually take on the employment function as well. And in that way are able to deploy apprentices out to individual employers sometimes, but oftentimes out to multiple employers over the course of an apprenticeship. And that works well, particularly in industries that are very project-driven or gig-driven. And it really takes a page from the highly successful apprenticeship experience in organized labor, where folks rely on the union to sort of organize multiple employment experiences over the course of their apprenticeship.

Kaitlin: As we wind down our podcast today, John, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

John: Yeah, so it's really simple. Come to our website, apprenticeshipsforamerica.org. You can sign up to be on our mailing list. We send out every two weeks a little e-digest that will be the roundup of news around apprenticeships in the country and also give you updates on what's happening in the policy world around apprenticeship. So love to have your participation. It's really easy to join Apprenticeships for America. Our membership is free. And by joining, you get to be part of a community of practitioners, participate in conferences, and be the beneficiary of research studies and reports that we're authoring. And of course, it helps shape our policy agenda. And then I would just say it's not all about Apprenticeships for America. There are many opportunities to be supportive of apprenticeship in other ways. Many regions have local regional apprenticeship advocacy organizations and networking organizations. And so I encourage you to look for those in your region, often connected, but not always connected to the local workforce board. And then finally, you know, just just take time to learn a little bit about it. I think once you start exploring what's out there in the world of apprenticeship, recognizing that it's not just a tool for the construction trades, but being used in multiple contexts, you'll be hooked, I promise. And there'll be more for you to learn and do.

Kaitlin: Great, well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, John. I hope our listeners will gain as much from this as I have.

John: It's great to be here.

Julian: Thank you so much, John.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces.info or on Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Please subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.

Ron Stefanski is host of the DisruptED podcast and Chief Community Affairs Officer for the Alliance for Adult Education Foundation. Ron shares his extensive experience in leveraging education technology to revolutionize learning and career opportunities, particularly highlighting his pioneering work with McDonald's to launch the impactful Archways to Opportunity program. This initiative has not only provided significant educational benefits to thousands of employees but also spurred the broader movement of education as a benefit across various industries. Ron discusses the early successes of these programs, the strategic partnerships that amplified their impact, and his current focus on upskilling and educational equity in today's rapidly evolving job market. Join us as we explore the key strategies and partnerships that are shaping the future of education and workforce development.

Please follow, rate, and review Work Forces on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you are listening. Also, please follow Kaitlin and Julian on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Work Forces. Today, Julian and I are joined by Ron Stefanski, host of DisruptED, a podcast that focuses on the very disruptive future in education, manufacturing, and healthcare. Ron is also the Chief Community Affairs Officer for the Alliance for Adult Education Foundation, an advocacy organization focused on expanding access to education and career opportunities for the 36 million Americans without a high school diploma. Prior to his current roles, Ron spent many years in the field of education technology, creating transformation across higher education and workforce development in both the private and public sectors. Most notably, Ron's work with the executive leadership at McDonald's launched Archways to Opportunity which invested $65 million in 2022, providing over 75,000 McDonald's employees with education as a benefit. Ron's work has been recognized at the Obama White House, Clinton Global Initiative, the Harvard Opportunity Summit, Jobs for the Future, and the US Department of Labor and Education. We're so grateful that you could join us for this conversation, Ron.

Ron Stefanski: I'm so glad to be here, and thanks for that send up. I mean, it's pretty flattering. Thank you, I appreciate it.

Julian: You have a very rich background. We'd love to hear just a bit more about your background, Ron, and how you approach your work.

Ron: So I've been in the upscaling arena in the workforce, higher ed space, for over 20 years now. And during that time, worked with a lot of ed tech companies. And so my expertise is in using education technology to close learning gaps and to accelerate learning and to provide greater access to learning. And I've learned a lot from the people that have participated in our programs over the years. I started out at the state level, helping to launch a virtual high school for the state of Michigan. And from there, I went into private industry and worked with Cengage for over 15 years, developing different programs. And during that time, we launched an online career focused high school program, not a GED, but a full-fledged high school diploma that was nationally accredited called the Career Online High School. And we launched that at the enterprise level with various organizations that were looking to do more to upskill their employee base. We benefited from participating in a commitment to action with the Clinton Global Initiative back in 2012. And from that experience, we made introductions with Walmart, McDonald's, Taco Bell, and a host of other organizations. Probably most notably is the work we did with Rob Lauer and Lisa Schumacher. Lisa had come from CAEL, Center for Adult Experiential Learning, and she knew so much about what, you know, needed to be done, but also amazingly was able to move the initiative forward throughout a large organization like McDonald's in a very short amount of time. We started out offering a high school diploma program to their frontline employees. We started with a small cohort of about 50 people. And we were kind of bedding the ranch. We expected that if those 50 people had a really rich experience we would see McDonald's take the program forward. And that's exactly what happened. And we were really gratified by that. They had some really tremendous experiences. And so we became part of the launch of Archways to Opportunity, a really state-of-the-art workforce program that McDonald's and Lisa had the vision to develop and launch over the years. And now, you know, they're offering that program in 14,000 stores. They went back to the federal government and got a waiver on the implicit employer agreements so that they could offer the program at no cost, not only to employees in their company stores, but radically in all of their franchise stores. And so franchise owners recognized, wow, this is a free benefit from McDonald's Corporation and we can offer this to our employees. And that was really one of the things that launched what I would describe as the education as a benefit movement where companies started to recognize, we need to do something to upskill our talent if we really wanna grow. And more and more companies then came to the table. Walmart was right there and Taco Bell followed and then Hilton and Amazon and Target and all of, you know, and over a hundred others have now joined that cause and are offering that program.

Kaitlin: You mentioned the initial launch of what became the Archways to Opportunity Program. What were some of the early indicators that that was going to be a success? And you said like, kind of bet the farm and then you saw this huge success emerge.

Ron: I think one of the early indicators was working with Lisa and her team. She recruited an amazing team of people, Marianne Mariola, Aaron Voss, and a number of other folks that were just truly, really passionate about helping employees. And you know, it immediately rendered invalid the stereotype you have of McDonald's, sort of, you know, not caring a lot about employees. And then that's simply not the case. They really went at it wholeheartedly and said, we really want to make an impact with our employees. And so that was one of the early signs. I think several of the early folks that came out, I remember Rob Lauber inviting me to their annual conference with all the franchisees from 14,000 stores. And he asked me to sit at the front with him. He said, I want you to watch this video sitting next to me, because I think you're going to tear up when you see this. And it was a young woman from Guatemala who had emigrated to the United States to Florida with her grandparents, and she didn't have a high school diploma. And so her grandfather knew a franchisee at McDonald's and got her a job there. And she found out about this program. And just as she was graduating, she got promoted to assistant store manager. And so that was an immediate, you know, first success, you know, and all of us were really proud of that and we all had an opportunity to meet her and speak with her. And that was, I think that was very energizing because when you see programs like that, that truly have an impact on frontline employees, that's a real, you know, energy boost to moving the work forward.

Julian: Yeah, it's incredible what Lisa, with your help, was able to build and really set the course for this, you know, for education as a benefit. Talk to us a little bit more, Ron, if you will, about your approach to working with McDonald's and other partners, you know, and your role.

Ron: I was the spokesperson, so to speak, of the program. So I made the initial connections with Lisa and Rob, and then we sort of outlined what we thought was possible, and they were going through their own ideation stage of what they wanted to accomplish in the program. And so we had a series of meetings to say, you know, how can we assist you in rolling this out to folks? And there were a lot of unanswered questions. How do you set up an online program and how are you going to track enrollments and how are you going to track, you know, when people actually count as an enrollment, you know, we wanted to be sensitive to the fact that in the early stages, we didn't want to be providing enrollments and have a lot of dropouts and then have, you know, McDonald's spending a lot of money on tuition for a lot of people that didn't complete the program. So we put those kind of safeguards in place. And then one of the key things we did was we recruited academic coaches for every one of the students. So each student that was entering the program had one-on-one support from an, you know, an academic coach and mentor, someone who was certified as a teacher. And I would say over 80% of our teachers continue to be and were at that time, formerly high school dropouts. So they were people who had gone on a different pathway to get their high school credentials. So they very much understood the mindset of an adult learner. And the Career Online program was designed for second chance high school participants. These are people that maybe through no fault of their own had a drop out of school to take care of a loved one, a parent, someone else. In the cases of a lot of men, males, women tend to get pulled out for daycare and family responsibilities. Men tend to get pushed out of high school for truancy and all that kind of stuff. But I think it's important to know what you also learn about people who have dropped out is that the myth of them being gang bangers and pregnant teens is just not accurate. There are a lot of people for whom life simply happened, and we really wanted to address their needs. And so the Career Online High School Program specifically, and I think rather innovatively, starts by bundling the four elective credits in an 18 credit high school curriculum and turned those into career certificates, onboarding career certificates, you know, at the high school level. And those can be in healthcare, daycare, teaching, medical technology, manufacturing, et cetera. Food and hospitality was one. So, you know, if someone was interested in really liked working at McDonald's and wanted to get promoted, that would be a great onboarding career certificate to obtain. So the students going through the programs are, you know, average age is 34, and they came into the program looking to get re-engaged in their education. So our approach was how do we re-engage them? The first way we did that was to offer this career certificate. So they could start taking those courses and feel confident and then build enough confidence to persist through the program. Uh, the second thing we did is we, we set up a competency based model. So no one fails the course. You know, a lot of these folks had experienced a lot of failure. And so they were convinced over the years, it just wasn't possible, uh, for them to succeed in a school environment. And the opposite of that is also true. What we find now after 10 years of doing this: We've graduated over 15,000 adults and 82% of them have gone on to post-secondary. So what happens is when you take someone that believes for the first 15, 20 years of their life that they're not capable of learning, and then you set them on its head and they can now see that they can succeed, their energy, appetite, enthusiasm, and persistence around advancing their education just continues. Many of them go on to four-year schools, but a lot more of them go on to trade school or two-year programs or certificate programs, just as importantly, because all those things are making headway into helping them enter the workforce in a much more mobile way, in a much more agile way, where they can take advantage of upskilling opportunities.

Kaitlin: So building on that point. You've mentioned to us prior that you have a particular interest in upskilling these days. So can you give us a sense of what you're seeing in that space in the present day?

Ron: Yeah, I see this with a lot of the guests on my own show, DisruptED, that, you know, we've come at an interesting time where education is highly disrupted. We're trying to figure out now does a four-year degree matter anymore? You know, does, you know, what are we going to do about the cost of education for many people? And so upskilling has become a particularly strong interest of mine. And it's because I look at it, frankly, from an economic equity perspective. We now live in a world where 700 people possess as much wealth as the rest of us. In history, we've never seen such economic inequality. And so when you start thinking about people in poverty, or you start thinking about people who are not where they want to be economically. Many of them think the game is rigged against them. And yet time and again, we are able to disprove that with one of the game changers in that equation, and that's education. So if we can accelerate education, if we can modify it to meet the needs of those learners, if we can deliver it easily and effectively through a series of different mediums, either face-to-face, hybrid, online, all those things are going to contribute to helping people get ahead in the game, and move ahead economically. And I think that's, for many people, that's all they're looking for. Many of our students, our parents have several children. Many of our graduates are intergenerational. So a parent may have taken the program, or a young adult who dropped out of taking the program and convinced a parent or another family member to do it. So I think all those things point to the same conclusion. And that is, education remains the most significant game changer. We have to figure out more and more how we deliver it most effectively to a broad audience.

Julian: So given that it is still the game changer, can you speak a bit now to the current state of affairs and the current workforce? And is there nuance with regard to getting people the education they need to thrive that we need to really consider now and as we go forward.

Ron: If you follow the work of Byron Auguste at Opportunity at Work, or you follow a lot of people, they're looking to move the skills forward agenda, where, you know, skills matter more than having a college degree. But I don't think it's an either or. I think it's an and. I think that ultimately people are going to settle around the idea that they need skills training, and that's important. And that can actually be the starting point for their work life, but they're going to also need and benefit from more education. And that ultimately leads to a degree granting program. So I think that's one of the things we're seeing in the upskilling arena is that the affordability issue is front and center, number one. And the second one is relevancy to work experience. So many students coming out of liberal arts schools, I happen to be a liberal arts major, I'm an art history and English major, and I really value and champion liberal arts degrees is a fine way to get into organizations. Research shows time and time again, liberal arts students may start out slower than an engineering person or a finance person in the workplace, but very oftentimes they leapfrog them because they've learned critical learning skills. Those things we used to call soft skills, now we call them durable skills or power skills, but they have developed mastery around that. Collaborating with a varied audience of people, multicultural audience of people. They've learned how to critically analyze things, so they're very good at critical thinking. And they have excellent communication skills, which remains one of the most important, durable skills in the workplace. So I think all those things have changed how people are evaluating educational options that are out there. On the affordability index, Southern New Hampshire University came in and made radically disrupted how we're delivering four-year education. Western Governors has done the same thing. National University, American College of Education, all of those have set education on its head and said, you know what, we can deliver a four-year education, but we're gonna have to do it much more affordably to reach that arc of people who can't afford the very high cost of a standard college education. And I think that's a really critical piece.

Kaitlin: And one thing Julian and I have been talking a lot about too, is are the links between, you know, high school or high school equivalency training certifications and then other post-secondary options and then what does it look like to go from that to a four-year degree and that those links are not or pathways are not always clear. I wonder, Ron, if you have any thoughts as to how we can, you know, strategies or best practices you've seen to help make those links clear for learners as they navigate from one experience to another.

Ron: Well, I think as educators and educational providers in the nonprofit or the more profit space, I think collaboration is gonna be a really important factor in helping to mete out best practices in terms of what those pathways might look like because they're no longer gonna be linear. Vicki Green, who's the general manager and senior VP at the GED services, an excellent example, they're doing a lot of great work to provide a GED equivalency. And we don't see them as competitors in the high school credential space, we see them as allies. Because all of us are trying to do the same thing and that's to advance these people in their pathway to gain full employment. And so I think we need to work together. So we've been talking with Vicki about how we can collaborate. And there are many other organizations out there that are looking to do the same thing. How do we bundle additional certificate programs or hands-on experience? I'm working with an organization now, 418 Intelligence, which has created an extremely robust platform for threat hunting. And you can't pick up a copy of The New York Times on a daily basis without reading about some significant cyber threat. Well, this boot camp that they've developed in concert with the U.S. intelligence services can detect live threats in real time. So imagine putting workers who have some technical competency or, you know, success, and then you give them a micro apprenticeship in cybersecurity. Now they're leaving after nine weeks and they are cyber threat hunters. Now they're not simply entry level people. We did a project with Eastern Kentucky's workforce system, and we took a whole cohort of people from making $15 an hour to moving into $60,000 and $80,000 cyber jobs while they remained in Eastern Kentucky, which is significant because we've moved away from face-to-face work in a building and more employers are getting creative about hybrid and remote workers. These folks all became remote threat hunters, never had to leave their community, and now they're going from making $30,000 or $40,000 to $60,000 to $80,000 to $100,000. I mean, that's a significant example of the kinds of things we could do in upskilling with technology, but also in partnership with the workforce system, the technology providers, and the community. And I think that combination, you're going to see more and more happen. Everyone talks about public and private partnerships, but we need to get real about that. We need to look at real situations and make a real difference. And then people will say, oh, that's what you mean by that. Oh, we should be talking about that.

Julian: Exactly. Ron, we like to ask all our guests, based on your lessons learned, what are practical steps that our audience can take to become forces in the future of work and learning?

Ron: Well, I think as an employer, I think we need to look at talent differently. At the senior level, we've now established that the problems we face as companies are larger, more impactful, more challenging. And the only way to address that is with a more diverse executive team. So diversity, equity, inclusion are no longer a proposition for the organization. They're strategic imperative. You just have to have a more diverse group with more women and people of color. If you wanna solve some of these problems, you have to have people that think differently and come from different perspectives in order to solve some of these problems. So that's one of the first things we need to do is look at the executive leadership and talk in those terms. I think the second thing we need to do is if you're in the mid-level or if you're in the enterprise in the learning and development space, you need to look more aggressively at what are the kinds of things we can be doing to help our employees succeed and build those programs around the learner and the people that are coming. And there I see a lot of people who are doing great work. Rob Lauber is still working with a lot of organizations to facilitate and advance that work. Starbucks is another force in that field. So there are a lot of people like that and we need to we need to shine a light on their efforts because the the Brandon Carson's of the world are really the ones that are taking big corporations and saying hey we're going to stand what we've done on our head and we're going to look at how we can make life better for our frontline workers and and part of that is providing an education. I think many of the companies that employ frontline workers have recognized that they need them to be more educated and more skilled and that they can't ensure those people lifelong employment anymore. Those days of us starting out in the company and advancing to a point and then staying there for 30, 40 years, those days no longer exist. And so I think the obligation, the employee contract that many organizations like McDonald's, like Walmart, like Starbucks, like Amazon are doing is they're saying, okay, we can't guarantee that you'll have a job with us for the rest of your life, but we can guarantee that your fortunes will be a damn sight better when you're, you know, when you work with us for three to five years, because you will have acquired durable skills and a job front facing with customers, critically important skills and experience. And we're going to provide you a range of educational options based on what you need and where you're at, so that you leave us in a better place. And I think that was the motivation for McDonald's to engage with us at the outset. I think that's the motivation that Starbucks has. And those are really, you know, virtuous motives that we have to help accelerate and incubate with and for them.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. It's really helpful to hear the different connections you're making across employers that are doing this work really well. And mentioning, I think specifically that link between public and private partnerships. You know, it's, I feel like it's one thing to say it and another thing to do that well. The complexities are real, but at the same time, like you're saying, when it's done well, the impact is really very powerful. And it's really helpful to have you call out models to learn from. I think that that will be very helpful to our audience. I know it's helpful to me.

Ron: I think one of the other things that we've learned in standing up the Alliance for Adult Education is we're looking for educational partners to join us in Alliance to advocate on behalf of those 36 million Americans that still don't have a high school diploma. That's fundamentally wrong. And everyone should be staying up at night worrying about that. So the Alliance is centered around bringing those organizations together that can advance that work from a policy perspective as well as a practice perspective. And I think that's very vital. So we were in Washington, DC a few weeks back. We've hired a public affairs group, the same one that works with McDonald's, the Prism Group, great group of people. And they've been taking us on the Hill to talk to people on both sides of the aisle and in both houses to talk about these things and to talk about it from a policy perspective. WIOA is up on the table right now for discussion and for reauthorization. And it's important that private providers as well as public providers, credible operators, are in that conversation. You know, for example, many people thought with the reauthorization of WIOA in 2014, we'd see a lot more online providers entering into workforce agreements to provide alternative pathways for people that didn't really happen. Why? Because we have snags in the policy and the process from the feds down to the states, as that money is trickling from the federal government to the state level, other restrictions are being put on it. So, in some states, for example, online providers are required to have a physical presence in the state in order to do business. That defeats the whole purpose of online providing. And so we need to make clear in those policies some of the details that allow credible, vetted, certified providers advance the ball. And that's all we're looking to do at the Alliance is to help them see, okay, this is a program that's having success. How do we make sure that we can fertilize, you know, more benefit and more opportunity to more people. And the workforce system is very vital part of that. But we also have to streamline their ETPL process. And that's a big discussion on Capitol Hill these days is how do we make that easier for organizations that are new to the game? You know, there are a lot of standard uses of that money that's being available through Pell through Title I through II. And we have to be pushing and helping advocate that the federal government sees the importance of broadening the aperture so more and different providers are in the game. And those providers are dictated by performance, not anything else. It doesn't matter whether or not they're public or private providers. It matters whether or not they're getting the job done. Clearly the K-12 system wasn't getting the job done for any number of reasons, but we now have a backlog of 36 to 40 million people that through no fault of their own, don't have a high school credential. 40% of the people going through college don't finish. I mean, we have to get real about those things. And I think the private sector plays as equally important role as the public sector in that.

Julian: Yeah, in terms of sort of the practical steps, your focus on, your real kind of end user focus on those people, on those frontline workers comes through loud and clear. And this really resonates for me in both in the conversations we've been having on the podcast and in our own work. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Ron: So in my case, you guys are partners in crime with me, so to speak. So I really enjoy the collaboration we're enjoying. People can find out about the work we're doing on a number of fronts in the DisruptED community, because that community started out with just a podcast, and then we developed a newsletter, and then we developed different editions. So we have an addition on upskilling and education. We have an addition on advanced technology manufacturing, and we have a third on healthcare. And we also have a DisruptED podcast now for what is most essential, which is ordinary people making an extraordinary impact. I think there's so many do-gooders out there. You too are vivid examples of that. People who are really just trying to help others that are doing it under the radar in our disruptive community is putting a spotlight on those people to talk about the work that they're doing and to amplify it. So I think that's really important. DisruptED now represents four different EdTech companies, 418 Intelligence, a cyber company I mentioned, Honor Education, which is doing some amazing things in launching a next generation learning platform for students. Honor Education was started by Joel Padolny, who was a former dean at Yale, and I'm really privileged to be working with them. Interplay Learning has developed skilled trades training using virtual reality. Amazing, amazing work that they're doing, helping people get really high quality, really high quality skilled trade certifications, really important. And then of course there's the work I'm doing with the Alliance and that's vitally important and kind of bringing people together and connecting them. And that's where the network of the DisruptED community has really come to bear. So you can find the network, you can find DisruptED on my LinkedIn and you can find it on Spotify and the other podcast channels that are out there. But by all means, I'm readily accessible on LinkedIn. I invite your listeners to reach out to me and to have these conversations. It's always great to connect with people and to find out what they're doing. And every day I find more and more people like you guys, the day-to-day do-gooders, the passionate and purpose driven, who are making a difference in people's real lives. I think that's just essential.

Julian: Well, thanks so much, Ron. We really, really appreciate the kind words and it's been incredibly, you know, I feel I've learned a lot in this last half hour. It's amazing. The work you've done, the network you've built will include information about connecting with you, you know, in the podcast notes. Look forward to continuing our conversations together as well. But thank you so much for taking the time.

Ron: Well, yes, and we'll have to have you on DisruptED to keep this conversation alive and vital. I think the work you guys are doing is incredibly vital to this whole movement. And I think we just have to build each other up and stay connected and move the ball forward.

Kaitlin: Well, thank you, Ron, so much. I really appreciate that. Look forward to keeping in touch and keeping the conversation going. And really appreciate your time today.

Ron: Well, thank you too. It's been a real pleasure and a real privilege.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Work Forces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.

Dr. Yves Salomon-Fernández is President of Urban College of Boston. With a rich background that spans multiple roles across community colleges and a senior position at Southern New Hampshire University, Yves brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in navigating the complex landscape of educational institutions. She shares her unique perspective on the intricate world of higher education mergers and acquisitions, drawing from her extensive involvement in various due diligence efforts and her leadership roles on several prestigious boards. Join us as we explore how mergers are reshaping the future of higher education and what this means for institutions seeking to sustain their missions in an evolving sector.

Please follow, rate, and review Work Forces on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you are listening. Also, please follow Kaitlin and Julian on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in.

Julian: Today we're joined by Dr. Yves Salomon-Fernández, President of Urban College of Boston. Yves has an impressive background in higher ed, and a demonstrated commitment to fostering inclusive economies. Prior to joining Urban College, she led several community colleges in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and served as Senior Vice President for Operations Planning at Southern New Hampshire University. Beyond her institutional leadership, Yves holds positions on the boards of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Mass Humanities, and Double Edge Theater, and contributes to the Federal Reserve Bank's Inclusive Economies Project. She's also been recognized for her inclusive leadership by the AAC&U and celebrated as one of the top 25 women in higher education by diverse issues. A proud immigrant from Haiti, Yves's educational background spans from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to Boston College, with a notable certificate from the University of Oxford. Her trilingual fluency enhances her ability to connect across diverse communities, underscoring her profound impact on higher education. Welcome, Yves.

Yves Salomon-Fernández. Thank you, Julian. It's great to be with you today. We're enjoying this beautiful sunny day, so it's awesome.

Kaitlin: Thanks so much for being with us today, Yves, and we're really looking forward to this discussion. So as we get going today, can you please tell us a bit about your background and your current role?

Yves: I feel like Julian said so much. So, Kaitlin, I'm not sure how much more you would like me to add, but I will say that I came up through institutional research, which is an unusual background for a college president. But it served me well throughout my career. My academic backgrounds are in political science and international relations, and I've got an econ degree from the London School of Economics, and then statistics. For me, all of these different disciplines have helped me to better understand, one, how to work with people, how to work with people across cultures, and also how to look at data, how to manage finances. So having that econ and quantitative statistics, psychometrics background has worked for me very well. And as Julian said, I am the president of the Urban College of Boston, which is an extraordinary institution that I think right now has even more relevance as we are seeing the increase in migration, immigration, and also the labor shortages that we are experiencing across the country. Urban College of Boston offers instruction in language for students as they develop and master their English proficiency. So the languages that we offer instruction in include Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Portuguese as students travel through their courses of study. So it's an extraordinary institution located in Boston, but serving students beyond the city of Boston.

Julian: Yves, you do have a very interesting and unique and I say pertinent background for a college president of today. And one of the areas where you've built expertise is around mergers and acquisitions in higher education. And so we want to learn about that, selfishly, and we are sure that our listeners would like to hear about this as well. What are trends you're seeing in this space?

Yves: Well, I think this is definitely a buzz area right now in higher ed. And I have a background that is primarily in the two-year colleges space, but I've also served at selective private research institutions and public institutions as an administrator, as a researcher, and also as an adjunct faculty. So it's a varied background. And you add in Southern New Hampshire University, and that just makes it a little bit richer. So Urban College of Boston is actually an affiliate institution of Southern New Hampshire University, and it really is a model that is quite unique in that merger and acquisition space. And as you mentioned, I spent some time at Southern New Hampshire University, and that was really an opportunity for me to learn a lot more about that world. At SNHU, I had an opportunity to lead or participate in a number of due diligence efforts where we looked at everything from large, expansive, four-year traditional, really with a lot of students on campus, for affiliation. Also looked at a venture outside of the country, and we also looked at a couple of small colleges, a four-year college, as well as Urban College of Boston, which I ended up leading the due diligence effort for. And that is a unique model. I also have other affiliations in that space through friends and colleagues in the area in Massachusetts. So it's been an interesting area of expertise for me to have developed. But I think overall what we are seeing right now is that there is a trend towards closures, mergers, acquisitions, and they take all kinds of shapes and form. So for instance, between 2004 and 2020, 80% of the closures were for-profit institutions. But today we're seeing something a little different. So since March, 2020, we've had 51 public or nonprofit colleges that have either closed or merged or announced mergers or closures or in affiliation with some institutions. So we're seeing a growing trend in that area. And now that you no longer have federal financial support keeping colleges afloat as the pandemic funds really have dried out for higher ed, we're seeing schools that can no longer sustain themselves financially look at all kinds of options that may be open to them. So it's an exciting time to see how institutions get creative around how to keep their missions alive through not, um, surviving as an independent institution, but really combining with someone who has or another institution that has a like mission.

Julian: Can you speak a little bit more to what that means? You know, sort of practically speaking, what does combining generally, what, what sort of form or forms does that take?

Yves: I mean, I think you see a lot of different forms. You have Marlborough College, for instance, that merged with Emerson right before the pandemic. Emerson College in Boston and Marlboro College was a small college in Vermont, and I know their leader very well and that was to me one of the best examples of a merger. You also have the Wheelock College and Boston University experience and I have two colleagues, Mary Churchill and David Chard who wrote extensively about that in their book, When Colleges Close, and you also have the Montclaire example, you also have the Bloomfield example. So there are a number of permutations that a merger or acquisition can take, and depending on how well institutions do their due diligence, how well they manage the communications, it can either become a public relations nightmare or something that ultimately, you know, they exercise their exit clause, assuming that there was an exit clause in the agreement, and the circumstances are such that one could actually exist. So yeah, lots of different models. And I think in the research literature in the years to come, we'll continue to see more in that area. And yeah, it's interesting.

Kaitlin: So for college leaders who are looking to merge or affiliate, what do they need to think about and know about and consider in this space?

Yves: There is so much to consider. It's a fascinating field that is emerging and where we are seeing people with expertise either in the traditional for-profit world or who are developing that expertise right now for higher ed specifically. For me, having led and been part of these due diligence efforts, there's a lot that the leadership needs to consider. And by leadership, I mean the board, the president, the executive team, and all the other constituencies. It's not just leadership and title, but also leadership around that specific situation. So first of all, assembling a team on each side, whether you are the person with whom that institution is merging or affiliating, or you are the person who is seeking a partner, I think it's very important to have a solid due diligence team and frequent communication certainly. And for that due diligence team, some folks may choose to also include a paid advisor, someone whose job is to do that, make sure it goes well, in addition to having that internal team that is liaising with the potential partner. I think institutions have to ascertain, especially one that wants to be affiliated with, to vet and to determine whether they can do this on their own. And also to make sure Yvesn if you are hiring a firm that you have a critical friend who is not part of the process, who can look at the documents, who can talk to stakeholders and say, yes, I think this is a good idea. This will serve everyone well, or you might want to look at this. You might want to look at that. Here are some red flags that we are seeing all depending on the complexity of the circumstance. So I would say for boards, my most important advice would be don't wait until you're at desperation point to say, hey, we want a partner because at that point it's already too late. And I would also say for presidents who are closest to what's happening on the ground to have the courage to say to your board, you know, things are not looking great. And if we take a longitudinal perspective, both retrospectively and also in terms of what we can anticipate, what we can expect, this does not look great, but we are in the best position that we can possibly be to look attractive to a potential partner. So I would definitely encourage folks to take that approach for both the president to have the courage and the board to say, yes, let's dig into the data, let's see what needs to be done and is this the best course of action? What kind of affiliation would we want to have, and also who are some potential partners? What are the criteria for looking for partners that would be suitable? So there, I would say once that is done and they decide whether or not to engage an external firm, the most important thing I would say is being able to keep confidentiality within the team because we don't want information getting out prematurely that might also affect the negotiations. But you also want transparency. So identifying at what point do you engage and whom do you engage in that process. Culture, I would say, is very important for both institutions. Assessing whether you're an institution that is more of a traditionalist versus an institution that is more innovative, more entrepreneurial, because that might be a divorce rating to happen, right? With the wrong institution. So making sure that there is an alignment there. Does your institution embrace technology or will it be an uphill battle if you merge with an institution where the faculty and staff are not on board? So things like that. I also think within the culture ascertaining what the HR, the people issues have been? Are there conflicts that might lead to long-term issues? Are there settlements in the works from situations that have not worked out? Are there potential large payouts that would have to be worked out? Is the culture such that people are generally getting along? What does that look like? So I think those things are also very important. And then vetting the community. How will the community, the geography, really support the success of the engagement of the affiliation if it were to happen? So all of those things are very important. And within the culture category, I would say talking to the alumni association, getting a sense of whether the alumni would like this or not. You know, we've seen out West, cases where alumni associations stood firmly against potential mergers and what that did to both institutions that were engaged in that protracted engagement, the due diligence process. So making sure that the alumni understands that they've been given sufficient data to understand what you are exploring, that they see it as an opportunity to keep the mission alive or to evolve the mission. Either way, communication is certainly important. And at the leadership level, ensuring that the president is an important and integral part of that, so that they have a succession plan, that they have a transition plan. Most institutions, you don't end up with two presidents, so someone's leaving. And what does that look like? Is the institution poised to have another leader who may not be the president, who's still at the helm, who's able to exercise that level of leadership? Or would the assuming institution engage in that search, either for someone to come from outside or elevating someone inside? And then the president will be the one who builds the case to the campus community and the stakeholders, and they will be managing and overseeing, if not managing that communication. So ensuring that that happens and of course, engagement of the executive team, ensuring that they are on board, that they can keep confidentiality. I also know of some cases where the negotiation took longer than expected. And so having a team, whether it is having them sign an agreement or going on the honor system that can wait until you have sufficient amount of facts and a sense of what things might look like in the future, though you can't predict everything, that they can keep that as they do the work and they engage in that. And in some cases, you might simply just come out and say, we are exploring. So to put yourself out there and everyone knows very transparent. So it really depends on the circumstance. And then I would say the executive team also, once you've decided this is where you want to go, needs to be supportive, because they are the ones who are going to engage their teams around those conversations, who will be soliciting constructive feedback, unintended consequences, other things that may not be visible to an external partner who is helping with the due diligence. So they are the ones who are going to be able to do that. And they're also going to be the ones that see opportunities in that engagement. The president is not that close, right? From their vantage point, they can't see everything. They are things from the ground and in middle management that they're not going to know, not going to see. So I think all of those things are really important. And then the finances, right? That's a big piece of it. So looking at the trends, looking at the potential that exists for everybody in that affiliation, really digging into the costs. What are one-time costs? What are ongoing costs? What are contracts that still have to be paid out? IT is a huge cost. If you have an institution where you're expecting full integration and one is very much, very solid in terms of their student information services, the student information system, their learning management system, and one that isn't. So you can expect a significant cost and security and everything else that that entails. And there is just so much in that space that needs to be considered. And then you have, of course, the US Department of Education communicating that. There is also the regional accrediting agency. So who are the folks who need to know, the departments of higher education, who are the folks who need to be involved. Your attorney general's offices, you know, that also may need to be involved. And of course, at the appropriate time engaging students. How will current students view this? How will you treat them with the care and the support that they deserve? How will you integrate their voices as appropriate into the process? Because students will see things that we don't see. They will also see opportunities that we may not see from our vantage point because we're not students attending our institutions. So it's important to also get all of those perspectives and then figuring out what would, whether it is integration, what would that look like, figuring out what would the new board look like, who would be part of one board versus another. Cumberland County College where I was, that was the first place where I experienced a merger. It is now the College of South Jersey. There was a merger. And so two institutions merged, and you also have to figure out contracts. So are you a public institution where you have multi-year contracts with different unions that are working at the college? What does that look like? How do you treat people with care, with respect, with dignity? And sometimes there are tough decisions that have to be made when you will have to let go of some folks. So how do you make sure that people are taken care of? Our institutions exist because we have faculty and staff who care deeply about students. We have people who take a lot of pride, and having a beautiful grounds for our students to enjoy, beautiful campuses that are clean, that are inviting. How do you treat those people? Folks who work in the cafeteria? Are you transitioning to an external company versus local and in-house sort of staff in your bookstore? And so there are lots of little details that need to be figured out once you agree after the due diligence process that this is the way to move forward. So it can be an exciting opportunity for both institutions. So really thinking through what is the value add for each can be super exciting. But also institutions need to go in eyes wide open and with the possibility that this may not work. And that is the point of the due diligence.

Kaitlin: Wow, so you have covered a tremendous amount of ground. And there are clearly so many considerations here between the financial considerations, legal leadership, organizational change and culture shifts. What does this mean for alumni? What does this mean for students? How do we think about the external landscape in which these institutions are operating? There's clearly, there are so many factors at play here. I have many follow-up questions, but I guess one that comes to mind for me is once the change has been made, what does it look like to make the learner, just focus on the learners for a minute who are at these institutions currently, what does it look like to make that a streamlined experience and one that learners either feel like they're a part of or are aware of, or what does it look like to be transparent and I guess involving in that process?

Yves: Once that happens, there is some cheerleading that needs to happen. People need to feel like our institution has been given a lifeline. There is something exciting to look for in the change that is impending and encouraging students to talk among themselves, asking them what do they feel most hopeful about and what do they feel most anxious about? Right? Change is double-sided. There are things that you will be losing and there are also things that you will be gaining. So from the student perspective, asking them, what are those things? What about our culture that you want to retain that you don't want to see get lost through this? And what do you think we need to evolve? And students are generally very opinionated, as we all know. So I would say definitely, as you rightly point out, getting their opinions, getting their involvement makes a lot of sense. And also I would caution against doing it prematurely before you have the details. And there are some things where, you know, you don't have a crystal ball for, and you won't be able to predict, but you can say, yes, here are the things that we do know, here are the things that we don't yet know, and here are the things that you can help shape. So giving them a sense of agency, letting them know that they matter. At the end of the day, we are interested in keeping institutions alive because we think we have a unique mission. We think we serve students in a particular way that others don't, or that we serve a particular demographic of students that others cannot serve as well. Or whatever that may be that makes your institution unique. Having students engaged in that process, because at the end of the day, we are working for them and with them. So giving them that agency is important and understanding that, you know, taking a sort of a paternalistic route to this will not serve anyone. So you don't know what student, we don't all know what students want all the time. So engaging them is very important.

Julian: It's interesting, you know, I've heard and followed from afar, M&As in the corporate world over the years. And as you talk about doing this in education, of course, there's this whole lot of complexity, particularly with the people, all these people involved, right? But I am interested in, you cited some examples earlier of other higher ed mergers and acquisitions. I'm also interested, given your business background, in the parallels with corporate M&A. How is it the same and how is it different? And are there examples that those of our many learned listeners who might be contemplating a merger or acquisition might want to consider as they think this through?

Yves: So I will say this. My business background really is purely academic. And I probably wouldn't use it strongly as a business background. I would say just an economics background, and just as a student of the field. And so to understand M&As, I've had to learn a lot and to study a lot. And for folks who are interested, I would say that EY Parthenon is a great place to learn from, Deloitte is another great place to learn from. Accenture is also another great place to learn from, KPMG is another great place to learn from.As always, there's the Harvard business review. I mean, there's just so much, you know, Sloan School. Um, that is where I have learned. And also just knowing, um, having experienced it myself twice and also, um, knowing colleagues, both in the corporate world and higher education world who've been through this, I would say there are two groups that I had admitted that are very important. One is the politicians. And they're even more important if you are a public institution. My first experience with an M&A was with a public institution. And so in a system where politicians have a huge voice, perhaps an outsized voice in the running of public colleges, and that was really important. That collaboration, which for me at times was kind of, it was new, let's just say it was new, coming from Massachusetts, where I had not experienced that level of involvement. So making sure that there is communication with the politicians and also the impetus for the merger acquisition may be coming from the politicians. So making sure that you also are reading the tea leaves and there's a lot in the unspoken language. Are you engaging with folks in person? I would recommend engaging in person so you can read the body language. You can read the things that take people aback, right? And things that they would not be willing to concede on. So all of that is important to look at. And then donors, donors are especially important, especially people who've had buildings, schools, endowed chairs, professorships, things like that that are named after them who have a huge stake at the institution.

So ensuring that you're engaging them, they know why we're doing this and also how you will keep their legacy alive. And if your mission will be changing significantly, if those folks gave because of that particular mission, how you are involving the mission, especially with planned gifts or multi-year gifts is really important. And I think a parallel that we can draw here is with schools that are going from being all male or all female and then moving to multi gender schools, right? People have a certain affiliation, especially if those donors were alums, that they know the school to have felt a certain way, they experienced it in a certain way, and now you're saying that you are radically changing it. So those are all things that I would say to consider and two important constituencies, politicians and donors.

Kaitlin: So as a follow up question to that, I'm going to the much more tactical levels for a moment here, Yves. But as you're mentioning all the steps to this, the process of one considering a merger acquisition and then actually going about it, I'm wondering how big are the teams that need to work together to get this done? I imagine it almost as multi-layered, where it's like maybe it starts with a smaller team and then it becomes a much bigger group that's involved, and then maybe it narrows again, or maybe there's certain people who communicate externally versus internally. Can you speak to that from your experience a little bit, just around how to manage, what does it look like to manage this on the inside? And how many people and how many teams are involved?

Yves: How big are the teams to me really depends on the complexity of the institution. And also who is on your board. So I would say in the case of Urban College of Boston, they had an attorney from one of the leading institutions as their board chair. And he knew M&As like the back of his hand, also knew the institution like the back of his hand had been on the board for over 20 years, approaching 25, and had also been the chair of the board for a considerable amount of time. Yet they still hired an outside firm. So it tells you how important that legal aspect of it is. And hiring the right firm is also very important. Topic for another time, we can talk about the attributes of the firm. If your institution is a small institution, you will likely need someone from the outside or a staff who is dedicating significant amount of time to this work. And also remember that people also have other jobs to do. So you will be engaging a big swath of your leaders in this. They still have to keep their day-to-day job going. So the quality of the output that you're going to get from them will be significantly impacted by their ability to do both their current job and take on this high risk significant exploration and ultimately the affiliation. So it really depends. That's my answer. But complexity is one, bandwidth is another, and the quality of the folks that you have also. And also assume that there are leaders, once they hear that this is going to happen, they're going to leave immediately. So I can tell you, I lost my CFO at Cumberland County College. I mean, she said, hey, look, you know, I love this college part of the community. I feel very committed to it, but I have two kids and I need to think about what's going to happen with my family. They are not going to have two CFOs. So she started looking and it turned out it was, she got this tremendous opportunity she could not pass on and it happened very quickly. And so suddenly, I'm out of a CFO to do the CFO job, and I'm out of someone who is highly skilled, who could really vet this for us from a financial perspective. So suddenly you have no one. So if you don't have bench, be ready to spend some serious resources on those issues, not just the immediate cost of attorneys and things associated with that. But as you lose critical folks, what are you going to do? And making sure that you can have temporary help to deal with that.

Kaitlin: Thank you so much. Yeah, really appreciate that diving deep there. I figured you would not say like, you need 10 people, the range, all the considerations.

Yves: Yes, and I will say it's good to have a former president on your team because they've seen everything. A retired president is a great critical friend. Someone with recency of having gone through that is a great critical friend. And then, someone who can also look at the equity aspect of this, right? Like depending on the composition of your team, you could have huge blind spots all over. So really looking at that in particular constituency groups, if you have a particular center where you feel like, people will hear this and say, oh my goodness, a religious school affiliated with a non-religious school, all of that, people are like, what are you talking about? And it might take some time to get them to see the opportunity and at the end of the day, you might say, you know what? Yes, I thought you were a pain in my side, but it turns out you make some really great points. There's a levell of humility that you need to bring into these discussions and being open to it may not work. The smallest things will not make it work. And when I said what I said about being in person, so very important to share a meal with that group, spend a half day with that group, spend a day with them. Get to know people across the hierarchy, not just meeting with the top level folks, that gives you a sense of the culture. Being on campus or being in remote meetings or different constituency groups, your faculty senate, your staff group, and some one-on-one, so you get to hear things, and then each go back, each group go back and say, what did you hear? What did you think? What sense did you make of this? How do you, what's your sense of the team? You've now had severall engagements. How does it feel? And those things are really, really important.

Julian: So as we begin to wind down this discussion, which has been incredibly fascinating, and I feel like we're probably barely scratching the surface here, and you've done some of this, but for listeners who want to step into this field or consider mergers and acquisitions, what are some practical steps that they can take to be forces in this area, in this context?

Yves: Well, I would look at it that way. If I were to hire someone, either as a primary person or a secondary or tertiary person, I would want them to be able to speak the language of higher education. So having some background, recent background in higher education, understanding the field, and there are so many areas we didn't talk about. Your workforce development, Julian. We looked at a school that had a significant workforce development apparatus and funding coming from that as a source of revenue. There's so many things. So I would say one, ensuring that you've got people who have business sense, ensuring that you have people who have higher education experience, higher ed experience, having people who can look at how higher ed is financed and look at the books and really assess the books. People who are not just internally focused, but also externally focused. What does the external landscape look like? As the college that is, or university that is assuming another university, can you actually thrive in that area? How are the economics of the area? So having people who have that sort of ambidexterity, right? That you can look back, you can look forward, you're also multi-disciplinary and you can see not just in your specific area of expertise, but looking at it holistically, what does the ecosystem look like and what does inside of the institution look like? How do the multiple parts make the whole? So those kinds of experiences, people who are also astute people assessors, right? People who have a good, who can engage with others, who can read others, and not misread them. And people who are also, I'm a very, I'm both like a qualitative person and a quantitative person, a feelings person, as well as a very empirical, oriented and empiricist person. So you have to be able to do both. And if you know that's your blind spot as the leader, make sure you hire people who can do that for you. People who can also, as kids say colloquially, who can get the T, right? Are there things that are brewing, right, that you don't know? There's a tea that is brewing and somebody else knows, you know, potentially more than one person knows, but no one wants to let you know. And as the acquiring institution, you want to know. So yeah, so I would say, you know, the same sort of competencies that one looks for in a leader, the same kind of blind spots, and also the same sort of pragmatism, realism that we have understanding that not a single person will have all of the skills that you want, but they are humble enough to know what they don't have and pull in the expertise and perspectives that they don't have.

Kaitlin: This has been a conversation that has, I feel like, raised so many really big considerations and has given, I know it's given me, I guess a new appreciation for all of the complexities here. And so as we close out today, Yves, how can listeners of this podcast continue to follow you and your work?

Yves: Thank you, I appreciate that. Always good to have a little bit of self plug. My Instagram and Twitter handles are @presyves and my website is also the same. So www.prezyves.org. So it's exciting. Thank you for the opportunity, Kaitlin and Julian. You're always fun. I'm a big fan of the work that you're doing, and maybe we'll see you in the M&A space too.

Julian: Thank you. Only if you'll join us. This has been great. Thank you so, so much.

Yves: My pleasure.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Work Forces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.

Dr. Albert Lewis, Jr. is the Chief of Staff and Executive Vice President at Northwest State Community College. Al shares his unique journey into the field and his innovative approach to aligning institutional strategies with student, community, and workforce needs. He discusses the challenges community colleges face in a post-COVID world, including maintaining relevance amidst industry certifications and the abrupt shift to online learning. Al also delves into his efforts at expanding apprenticeship programs, opening a new campus, and leveraging data analytics to better support student success. Throughout the conversation, his customer-centric mindset shines through, emphasizing the importance of understanding and serving the diverse needs of all stakeholders in the education-to-career pipeline.

Please follow, rate, and review Work Forces on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you are listening. Also, please follow Kaitlin and Julian on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: On today's episode, we're joined by Dr. Albert Lewis, Jr., an educational leader with extensive contributions to the fields of higher education and workforce development. Al currently serves as chief of staff and executive vice president at Northwest State Community College in Ohio. Throughout his career, he spearheaded transformative initiatives at several institutions, including expanding customized training programs, developing innovative career pathways, securing substantial institutional funding, and championing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Al's been instrumental in leading multiple institutions in the development of innovative workforce development divisions, programs, and industry partnerships. It goes without saying that he has left a lasting impact on the institutions he's served and the students he's mentored. Al holds advanced degrees, including a doctorate in education, specializing in teaching and learning, an MS in industrial and organizational psychology, and an M.Ed in education administration. Welcome to the podcast today, Al.

Albert Lewis: Thank you. Good to be here.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thanks so much for joining us today, Al. It's such a pleasure to have the chance to speak with you. So as we get going, can you please share a bit about your background and how you approach your work?

Albert: Sure. You know, I came into higher education in a nonconventional way, but it's probably more conventional now than ever. I started a career in broadcasting. That was my initial career. I spent about seven years in the broadcast industry to make a change and I became an entrepreneur. I published a drug education newspaper for about seven, eight years that went into about 150 school systems in two states. As I closed my business down, because I saw trends changing, I started looking for a job and I answered a job ad for Cuyahoga Community College in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and just looked at it as a job. It was for a sales rep. I said, well, I can sell. Feel like I can sell anything. So I applied and got the job. And I came to Cuyahoga Community College, which is also known as TriI-C, basically looking for a job, but ended up finding my calling as a higher education professional. And what really, I think, cemented my reason for being in community colleges is I had a chance to work with students who were SNAP recipients and also formerly incarcerated people, helping them to learn the skills that would enable them to get a job. So, get off SNAP benefits, not go back into jail. And to me, that was like so powerful to me. It was like, it's like the, you know, the epitome of the American dream. You know, community colleges meeting you where are and then taking you to where you want to go. And so from that perspective, I was hooked. So in terms of how I approach my work, it's really interesting. I was a very successful sales rep and I had a very successful business, and what made both of those successful for me was I took the approach of how do I best serve my customer? And so I really kind of clued in on what the customer needs were, and provided the solutions that made sense. And so that's really the approach I've taken in the higher ed field is, you know, what are the needs of the community? What are the needs of students? What are the needs of the workforce? And simply pull people together to address those needs in a way that helps students move forward in their careers, for organizations to get the talent that they're looking for, and for the community to be better off by having employed folks ready and able for work. So that's kind of how I operate.

Julian: It's funny that talking about sort of serving customer is, it really stands out to me at least, you're leading with that. And I think that, you know, for so many of us, a lot of this work has kind of come more the kind of like, you know, we're the experts, we're the academics, we're imparting knowledge. And it's interesting to me that you come at it from this very sort of end user perspective.

Albert: Well, I think there has to be a balance, right? I mean, when you think about a student, a student comes to us looking for an opportunity to grow educationally. You know, our job is to, as an institution, is to have the pathway…first of all, identify what they're interested in doing and then align their interests with the pathways that we have at the college that will afford them the opportunity to move into a career that they want. But it all begins with what that student is looking for. I mean every school you go to has a plethora of academic options but they're not, they don't fit for everybody and I think the key to success for the institution as well as the student is to identify that best fit and allow them to then pursue that course of action.

Julian: So when did you first take that job with Tri-C by the way?

Albert: Tri-C is an interesting story. I was there on three different occasions. So I started in '97, stayed for two years, and then I left. Came back after I was downsized from another company and came back for another year stint under a grants department and when the money ran out I left again, and I was gone for probably about three years and I came back the last time and I stuck and I stuck for six years. So I stayed from, my longest stint was from 2006 to 2012 where I was the executive director of community and workforce training and director of business development.

Julian: So your time in the community college world dates pretty far back now. So given your years of experience, what have you seen as the challenges for community colleges historically, and particularly now in the post-COVID environment.

Albert: I think from an educational perspective, I would say relevance. The COVID situation really challenged the relevance of community colleges in a number of different ways. When I was at Bellevue College, which was on the West Coast, Pacific Northwest, I was in the backyard of all the IT giants, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and they were starting to come out with their own certifications and ways of qualifying people. And it was getting to a point where people, they were, they actually got to the point where they were saying you don't need a bachelor, baccalaureate degree. We will look at your certifications and if you've got this specific set of certifications that identify or validate a skill set, you know, we will be looking to hire you. And so that was a really huge change for, I think, for community colleges and colleges in general. When companies started going away from the need to having the baccalaureate degree and then even the associate degree but looking more toward certifications. I think another challenge that happened with the COVID-19 was we switched to online learning, and for many community colleges we weren't ready for that. Now you had people who were teaching and they were you know die-hard. I got to be face-to-face, no interest in working online. And then within a matter of a week or two you're now totally online, but also totally in many ways totally unprepared to facilitate an online course along with the learning artifacts and learning I guess protocols that go along with online learning. So that created quite a challenge, I think, for many schools. And I think as a result of that, you had many students who felt the same way. They were signing up for a on-the-ground class and did not feel comfortable taking an online class. And so I think from both sides, you had a little strain going on to the point where there were some schools that lost enrollment as a result of it. Now, one of the benefits, I think, for K-12, at least in our area, was that since a lot of the K-12 were going remote, well that allowed them in some cases to be able to take college courses because if I'm going to go remote, I may as well go ahead and take the college course and get credit for the college course and the high school courses at the same time because we're going to be remote so why not do that. So I think there were some ancillary benefits for some of the K-12 depending on what area of the country you were in.

Kaitlin: It's really interesting to think about the impacts on that time period for K-12, higher ed, and schools that were already perhaps more focused on online learning and those that had never experienced that shift before and trying to do that kind of on the fly and very rapidly, there's just myriad complexities that emerge there. I'm curious, you mentioned relevance being a key piece of your work and how you think about remaining relevant. What are your current efforts at Northwest State Community College that are focused on remaining current both with the changing needs of industry but also just you know the changing world of education and work?

Albert: I think one of the things that we're doing is we're opening a new campus, which is about roughly an hour from where we're located now. We are in what's considered a rural area of Ohio. So our nearest major city is Toledo, Ohio, which is about 45 to 50 minutes to the northeast of us. And so literally our school is located right next to a cornfield. And so one of the things that we've been challenged with is increasing our traditional and non-traditional enrollment. And so we had an area of the county that we received about 6% of our students from, but that part of the county represented 25% of the population. And so we were not serving that community very well. So a decision was made that we need to acquire a building or build a building in that area and have a branch campus there. So that's I think our number one goal right now in terms of increasing enrollment is to get that campus up and running. Obviously, with that being said, there have been challenges around construction and construction costs because of what happened with COVID. There have been several delays in being able to get equipment that we need to have, but we're continuing to work through those. We actually have a temporary location right now that we're working through in terms of being able to offer some classes down there. In addition to that, we've actually solidified our reputation in the apprenticeship area. We have several apprenticeships with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers throughout the entire state of Ohio. And we've done very, very well with that. And also we've actually been able to replicate that with several businesses locally, creating apprenticeship opportunities with some of our neighboring businesses and industry partners here locally. So it's been a real commitment to connecting our students to the workforce in different ways. And the other thing we're doing too, is we're actually looking at ways to identify, looking at auto credentialing. We have students that will complete a degree or certificate but never apply for graduation. Well when that happens we don't get credit for it and nor does a student get credit for it. So we're looking at ways to credential students who've earned the credential in ways so that they can have something on their resume and in their portfolio. This way they can say I completed a certificate or I completed an associate degree. So we are looking to create those opportunities as well as reverse transfer. In other words, you leave us and go to your four-year school, well some of the courses that you complete there would meet the requirements for you to have an associate degree. And I think that anytime you can demonstrate on your resume and on your portfolio that you've completed something, that says a lot about who you are as an individual, the educational path you've taken. It also gives an employer another reason to kind of look at your resume because you've taken a number of steps to get to where you are.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. I'm curious to know, I have many, I guess, questions based on that response, but one of them that sticks out to me is your work around apprenticeships. It seems like there's so much movement in that direction right now nationally. And I'm curious to know, what does it look like to build, kind of from the ground up, those apprenticeships with different companies, businesses, and what are some of the successes and challenges you face?

Albert: We've been very fortunate in that we actually are able to create apprenticeships. We are actually designated by the state of Ohio as an entity that can create apprenticeship programs. And so with that being said, we can actually customize apprenticeship programs for companies. Now there are certain rules that have to be in place. For instance, it has to be wage escalation after a certain period of time. There has to be documentation of mentoring. There has to be documentation of training. So there's a number of requirements that we have to meet, but what we do is we make it easy for the employer. Instead of the employer having to keep track of all that, we keep track of all that, we keep track of all that for them. So we make it easy for them to have the student or their employees be part of the apprenticeship program because we're going to handle all the paperwork. That's the part they don't care about. They don't want to deal with. However, they do recognize the value of having a well-trained employee. And for that, they benefit and we benefit as well making it happen. But we are well positioned to handle that paperwork. We've got a team that's expert at handling apprenticeship programs and the nuances that go with that.

Julian: And AL, just sticking on the topic of apprenticeships for a moment. You mentioned that you're developing apprenticeships and offering apprenticeships statewide. How are you able to do that?

Albert: Well typically what's happened is we will have an organization contact us and ask us if we would be open to working with them in an apprenticeship program. Typically we've done a really really good job from a customer service standpoint in terms of paying attention to the organization, having a conversation with the organization. What we do is we build what we call great relationships with these entities. You know, these students are earning college credit, you know, as they're going through their apprenticeship program. So it's not a non-credit situation. It's a, they're, they're receiving roughly about 36 credits, and we've had instances where students have actually achieved an associate degree along with their journeyman certification at the same time. You know, which we encourage them to do because you might get tired of climbing poles at some point in time and want to move into supervision. Well that degree allows you to that gives you a leg up on the person that's also climbing those poles as well. And so once again we encourage them to to move forward with getting their degree and some have done that. We've also been in talks with some of the apprenticeship programs who actually are looking potentially making it part of their program the associate degree part of their program. So we're still exploring how that might look as we move forward. But primarily the reason we have so many apprentices is because we make it easy for them to serve their constituents and we provide the appropriate credit for what they do.

Kaitlin: Well, I feel like such a key piece of it, it's funny we're circling back to the concept of how to best serve a customer, right? So much it sounds like of what you're doing is really making the lift easier on employers and really taking a lot off their plates.

Albert: We think about what we do and I think that this is part of, you know, I think the re-imaging of higher ed is we, you know, people, it's almost sacrilegious to think of students as customers, right? But the reality is they are our customers. I would love for us to take the same approach that Amazon and some of the higher end IT companies approach their customers. In other words, you know, they do a lot of data mining. They understand the nuances of their customers. They know how to bring products to them that they potentially might like. They use predictive analytics. You know, I would love to see more of that coming into higher ed because we certainly have the data about all our students. And so certainly if we leverage machine learning, we probably can figure out ways to help retain more students, but also graduate more students, right? Hypothetically, if we had a persona for a student and every student is outfitted in a cohort kind of model for lack of a better way, and if a student starts to deviate from what is prescribed as the optimal pathway, there's a warning flag that goes up somewhere in our system. I say, hey, this person, they're taking the courses outside of the prescribed thing, which could elongate their time at the institution. That's kind of how I think about the opportunity to predict their analytics, because now they're getting a call from their advisor, saying, hey, we saw you signed up for this class. This is not part of your prescribed program, and it is going to cause you to maybe stay an extra semester or something like that. You know, then we can have the conversation and understand why the student is making that choice. We're not certainly not going to deny it. They may have a legitimate reason for taking that for something that we may not know about, but at least we'd have an opportunity to counsel a student and say, hey, listen, this is going to take you off track and it could lend you to being here a little longer than you might want to. You know? So once again, in my head we need to kind of look at those tools, right, that are used in private sector and see how we can basically help better support our students.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. And to that point, I guess I'm wondering, there's so much potential for use with of those private sector tools. And I think there is more and more movement in the higher ed space around how do we think about learners as customers or clients in the education we're providing. What are the barriers that you feel like you're facing as you're looking to accomplish your goals and as you're thinking about expanding apprenticeships or expanding a new campus? I know you mentioned you know some of the post COVID-19 challenges associated with construction, but like you know what are you what are you facing?

Albert: Well, I think the external challenge is the perception of the value of education now. You know there's a truly truly a backlash toward education because obviously with unemployment being very low across the country, people feel like they're working and they're good right? They don't want to incur lots of debt. They don't want to take out loans. And they think that in many cases they can get a better job without the college if I just get this cert or that cert. And the truth of the matter is, in some cases, yeah, you probably could get a better job and make more money without college, depending on where you live, depending on what industries are available. But what I say is college gives people options that they normally don't have. And the other piece too is, you know, you have a lot of people and I call these jobs survival jobs, where they're making 16 bucks an hour, right? And they get an opportunity to go from another company that'll go, oh, I can make two bucks an hour more there. Well, then they realize that that two bucks an hour really didn't move the needle very much, right? And so you get people that are kind of caught in that circle of getting, you know, getting that next job, making just a little bit more that on paper looks good, but at the end of the day, it's not really moving them in a way that's drastic. And I think that's where education really comes in because education can move the needle in a big way. You know, when you look at the stats of high school versus associate degree versus some college versus bachelor's degree, it just grows incrementally as you go through that process. But once again, those barriers are still, a lot of it's perception. You know, the economy right now appears to be good, which it is, but once again, we're still talking about those lower wage opportunities that people get into not recognizing that you know for a year or two of college you can go from 16 to 25 dollars an hour. Now you're making a dent. Now you're getting to living wage, And if I'm not mistaken I believe the Georgetown Center for Workforce Education puts a living wage at around 17-18 dollars an hour. So if you're not making 17-18 dollars an hour then you're not really at a living wage and even at 17-18 dollars an hour what really can you do with that? I mean, depending on, once again, depending on where you live, you're probably possibly still living with your parents or possibly in a one-bedroom apartment or you're in an apartment with roommates, you know, how do you really make that next step in your life in terms of being able to, you know, get a family, have children, and all, buy a home, and buy the kind of car you want, you know. That's the challenge, you know, short-term versus long-term for many people.

Julian: Well, the community colleges are such a key lynchpin in making that link from the sort of relatively dead end to the family sustaining wage.

Albert: Absolutely. You know, when you think about it, you know, we got students that have come through our doors and many community colleges, though they came in here, you know, 18, 19, they leave at 20, 21, and they're walking into a job making 25, $30 an hour because they've got a nice skill. A welder, you know, they're a certified welder, or they've got an associate degree in mechatronics, and they're making $60, $70,000 a year, you know. And if they want to go back to school, you know, then they have the opportunity to go back school through their employer being have their employer pay for their baccalaureate degree because one of the things we want to see students do is continue their education because they may not want to do what they're doing right now 20 years from now, and and I think that what education does is it gives you options it gives you plenty of options to make it to make change because you've got that piece of paper that says you've got X number of skills you got X number skill sets that could be transferred in other areas.

Julian: Based on your lessons learned now, what are practical steps our audience can take to become forces in the future of work and learning?

Albert: I think it goes back to where I started. First and foremost, understand your student needs, understand the workforce needs, understand the community needs, and then align your institution strategically to address those needs from top to bottom. And that's sometimes very hard because sometimes you get faculty that doesn't value workforce, and sometimes you get workforce that doesn't value faculty. You know so you got to break down those silos within the institution and recognize that everything we do is geared toward helping someone find a job. Whether if they're transferring to a four-year institution at the end of that rainbow is what, a job. If they're coming here for two years at the end of that rainbow a job. You know so at the end of the day we are prepping students for the world to work you know and there's a contribution that the liberal arts side makes to and and the contribution that the technical side makes to it. And both are equally as important. You know, it should not be either or, it should be and and both in order to move the institution forward. So I think, you know, from once again, from my perspective, understanding student needs, understanding community needs, and understanding the workforce needs are really the keys, I think, to to moving the needle in terms of getting students ready for the world of work.

Kaitlin: That sounds like that's a very holistic way of responding to that question, especially for our audience, right? Like, think about all of the players involved and align your strategy accordingly.

Albert: Easier said than done.

Kaitlin: Exactly.

Julian: No, but it's what it's all about. It's what it's all about.

Kaitlin: That's right. So as we wrap up our conversation today, Al, how can our listeners learn more about what you're doing at Northwest State Community College and how can they continue to follow your work?

Albert: I'm on LinkedIn as Albert Lewis Jr. Dr. Albert Lewis Jr. Also I can be reached at my email address which is [email protected] or you can call me 216-338-4240. Happy to have the conversation. I'm always in conversation with colleagues across the country because we're all trying to figure it out. You know best practices, replicating best practices. Looking for new ideas, because there's more than one way to skin a cat and I'm not afraid to try any of them. Because at the end of the day it's about learning and then iterating, because there's no, you know, because what you did today might not work tomorrow. You know, so you constantly have to keep a pulse on what's going on with your students, what's going on in your community, what's going on with the workforce. Because things are shifting quicker than we've ever seen them before in history of man.

Kaitlin: Absolutely.

Julian: Here, here.

Kaitlin: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Al. We really appreciate everything you've shared with us today. And we take away many lessons from this conversation.

Albert: Thank you. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Julian: Really appreciate it, Al. Thank you so much.

Kaitlin: Thank you. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Work Forces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.