In this episode of Work in Progress, my guest is Amanda Cage, the president and CEO of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

The nonprofit is a national network of innovators and implementers in workforce development, says Cage, with a shared goal of collaborating with workers, employers, and communities to advance a skilled workforce, promote good jobs, and invest in equitable outcomes.

The National Fund and its partners co-create opportunities and solutions that allow workers to thrive. “This includes training, upskilling, and workforce learning (such as apprenticeship), but also other interventions that promote worker engagement, satisfaction, and well-being.”

Cage explains, “Essentially, these communities have come together and on some level have agreed to our four integrated solutions framework, where we focus on activating employers to make jobs better, equipping workers for success, changing systems, and co-investment.”

Practically speaking, these collaboratives are built around industry partnerships in which employers work together to solve some of the problems that they were collectively having, usually around talent recruitment or retention.

Cage says, “We have industry partnerships in manufacturing, in construction, healthcare, IT, and a number of other industries. And when we started working with employers in those industry partnerships, we realized there are some common elements around job quality and making sure that workers had access to what we consider to be a quality job.”

“As part of that, we created a framework of what that quality job looks like, a definition. So we work with employers now to really think about their internal jobs, how those jobs are designed and how we can make them a quality job through a variety of elements.”

According to the nonprofit, they “catalyze investments in a competitive workforce where people are empowered to learn, train, grow, advance, and achieve their potential.”

Listen to the podcast here, or download it wherever you get your podcasts.

Read the transcript for this episode of Work in Progress here.

Episode 177: Amanda Cage, president & CEO, National Fund for Workforce Solutions

Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation

Producer: Larry Buhl

Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim

Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

In this week’s Work in Progress podcast, I speak with Gregory Johnson, managing director of The Rockefeller Foundation’s U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative.

The mission of The Rockefeller Foundation, says Greg Johnson, is to fight for vulnerable families who have been locked out of economic prosperity here at home and abroad. He says it crucially import now, as we work toward a post-pandemic recovery.

Through its Rockefeller Opportunity Collective (ROC), the Foundation is putting $15 million into the hands of a group of government, business, faith-based, and non-profit partners in 12 U.S. communities. Johnson says the money will be used to eliminate barriers to accessing capital and credit among low-wage workers and small businesses operated by women, Black and Latinx owners.

“We’ve been really focused on how to build public-private partnerships that bring capital into communities that have had a really hard time securing it,” says Johnson. “Minority-owned businesses are less likely to receive loans. They’re more likely to forego applying for loans for fear of rejection, and they tend to pay higher interest rates on business loans compared to the non-minority counterparts when they do receive those loans.”

Small Businesses are Job-Creators

According to ROC, by helping provide better access to capital, there is the potential to create more than one million new businesses, which will create nine million new jobs and boost the national income by more than $3 billion.

Creating new businesses will build stronger families and communities, Johnson adds. “We know that the research suggests that business ownership is associated with higher levels of net worth and that for black and LatinX small businesses, this also serves as a community stabilizer and is a highly visible example of economic mobility.”

The Rockefeller Foundation Opportunity Collective will include the following 12 places: Atlanta, Ga.; Boston, Mass.; Chicago, Ill.; El Paso, Tex.; Miami Dade County, Fla.; Houston, Tex.; Louisville, Ky.; Newark, N.J.; Norfolk, Va.; Oakland, Calif.; Baltimore, Md.; and Jackson, Ms.

Johnson says, “The data drove us to where we are. Urban areas are minority and COVID centers. Black businesses and black populations are geographically concentrated in urban hubs. Forty percent of black business activity is focused in only 1% of U.S. counties. That’s 30 counties across the country. 63% of those 30 counties had the highest rates of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., too.

“When we think about building back—when we think about the way forward—we would be fooling ourselves to think that we can get there from where we are without including low-wage entrepreneurs. When Black women are starting businesses at six times the rate of all of their peers, when Latinx women are starting businesses at rates that outshine most of their peers, when women are increasingly responsible for the finances of family and community and institution, we cannot do it without them. There is too much at stake.”

Johnson and I talk about the next steps with the investment, how it will be used to unlock these opportunities, in the podcast. You can listen here, or download the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this Work in Progress podcast here

Episode 176: Gregory Johnson, managing director, The Rockefeller Foundation

In this week’s Work in Progress podcast, I speak with Dr. Angela Jackson, managing partner at New Profit and the leader of the nonprofit’s Future of Work Initiative.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the country and economy, New Profit was working to fund programs and initiatives geared toward making sure everyone has equal access to opportunities for good jobs and careers.

This morning, the nonprofit announced a major step forward in that mission—naming the 15 winning solutions of its The Future of Work Grand Challenge. These are a diverse group of social entrepreneurs dedicated to advancing solutions that serve the most under-invested workers.

The Grand Challenge—created in partnership with XPRIZE Foundation, MIT Solve, and JFF—was borne out of concerns that automation, a growing skills gap, low wages, and crippling student debt are increasing inequities in the workforce.

“We had been working on this initiative for two years. We centered it around working adults, people who are in need of upskilling, but who can’t take the opportunity or cost to take off a year or go back to get a four-year degree,” explains Jackson.

“We were looking for accelerated learning programs that would allow a learner or a worker to earn while they learn. We think a lot about the 56 million US residents who are working minimum wage jobs—less-than-living-wage jobs—that need opportunities to skill up in a fashion that works for their complex and busy lives,” she says. “So we really wanted these entrepreneurs to be willing to center on the experience of these learners, and to create solutions that will work alongside their busy lives.”

Jackson says, “we’re giving (the) finalists access to $6 million in funding to implement solutions that will rapidly reskill 25,000 workers over the next 24 months into higher-wage jobs and equip influential workforce boards with vetted tools to help get Americans back to work,” Jackson says.

This next phase—the implementation phase—will be overseen by six new workforce boards. For each of the 15 entrepreneurs, they will be expected to quickly identify 500 people interested in their training. “They will do the training and that training needs to happen over 120 days. And then there’ll be another 120 days where they will get the wraparound supports and look at job placement.”

After those first 240 days, the Grand Challenge will look to expanding the number of people being trained. “If we can prove that we’ve done it for 500, the next step is saying, ‘Can we do that for 5,000? Can we do that in a separate sector?’ So they’re just doing training in one sector, how can they expand their offering to show proof of concept that they can do this accelerated training in several different sectors?,” Jackson tells me.

The ultimate goal is to achieve broader systemic change to help prepare 12 million Americans from underinvested communities for workforce success by 2025.

“Our North Star is around policy change and recommendations. I think we all can agree that our workforce system is not working for the people who are at the margins. And so what we hope to offer from this challenge—this experiment—are some practical recommendations, not only to the 538 plus workforce boards that are out there, but we’re also thinking about our federal government and state governments.”

You can read more about the 15 entrepreneurs piloting these training programs at their website:

Craig Newmark is one of the original tech billionaires, having made his considerable fortune founding Craig’s List back in 1995. For the past five years, he has given away hundreds of millions of dollars through his Craig Newmark Philanthropies to causes ranging from veteran homelessness to women in tech to supporting teachers to food insecurity to local journalism.

At its heart, in his words, his philanthropy is “about fairness, opportunity, and respect.”

“A lot of it has to do with what our country aspires to be. I believe that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it does bend towards justice. So people of goodwill should protect the country, should protect those values, should move them ahead,” Newmark says.

“We should not only push towards those values, but we need to protect the people who have fought for those values. We need to protect the people who are fighting for those values. Like the people who fought in kinetic wars towards those ends. Those are our veterans and their families. They need a break.”

In this special edition of the Work in Progress podcast for SxSW EDU, Newmark speaks with WorkingNation editor-in-chief Ramona Schindelheim about how he leverages his money and influence to help bring attention to these issues and discusses the type of organizations he gives his money to.

You can watch or listen to the podcast here or download the audio version wherever you get your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this podcast here.

Episode 174: Craig Newmark, founder, Craig Newmark Philanthropies

Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation

Producer: Larry Buhl

Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim

Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

WorkingNation partnered with Cognizant U.S. Foundation to explore solutions to the lack of diversity in the tech industry and share those stories in a series of podcasts and articles. This is the final part of the six-part series. If you missed one of the previous stories, you can find them all here on WorkingNation.com.

“Community is at the very core to what we do.” Rubén Harris is the CEO and co-founder of Career Karma. These are the words Harris chooses to sum up how his company—an app and web platform that connects career transitioners with coding and tech boot camps—is changing the makeup of the tech industry.

“We work with about 450 different boot camps in our directory, 7,000 trade schools, colleges, and universities. What’s very important is for us to preserve trust with our users,” Harris tells me in this Work in Progress podcast. “So, it’s very important for us to curate training programs that they can trust that actually have outcomes.”

Founded three years ago simply a trainee-trainer matching tool, the organization blossomed into a peer support network that is helping people who never thought they belonged in the tech industry break down internal and external barriers to entry.

Harris makes a point of saying you’re never too young to start coding, and you’re never too old. While tech is an industry that has traditionally been white and male, Harris doesn’t see it in terms of race or gender. Instead he sees it more in social-economic terms. “These are people that are blue collar that don’t have access to the technology industry and have never been in there before.”

Typically, Career Karma users tend to be 25 and older, and many of them hadn’t thought about a tech career until recently. “They’ve got kids. They have families. They might be working a job. They might have a degree from a state school or a community college, but they didn’t learn exactly what they want to learn. They’re in a job that is not exactly what they love to do.”

This is where community comes in.

Every person that downloads the app gets matched with a coach that’s currently enrolled in a job training program themselves. “They’re able to be put into a peer mentorship group of other people that are like them, like other moms or dads, and that keeps them motivated during the program,” says Harris.

“A career transition is very psychological and people lie to themselves—’I don’t have time’ or ‘I don’t have money,’ all kinds of things like this, but they want to do it. So we help people understand that you actually have no barriers, and just because you grew up in  (a certain) environment doesn’t mean that you can’t do this. Just because you have this obstacle doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. Let me show you somebody that did it. That’s essentially what we do.

“If you can put people that have a different perspective, no matter what obstacle is in front of them, you’re going to start changing the game. And that’s why we started with community first of people that have the mindset that there are no obstacles and we will overcome together.”

Harris and I go on to talk about Reskill America launched by Career Karma with the help of outside funders and designed to get past another hurdle that some of these transitioning workers face—the lack of a laptop and the inability to afford to buy one of their own

The idea for Reskill America also came out of the sense of community Harris w...

In this episode of Work in Progress, Matt Sigelman, the CEO of Burning Glass, joins me to discuss which jobs and skills will dominate the post-pandemic economic recovery, one he says will create as many as 18 million jobs over the next five years.

Burning Glass is an analytics company that provides real-time data on job growth, skills in demand, and labor market trends. In its new report, After the Storm: The Jobs and Skills that will Drive the Post-Pandemic Recovery, Burning Glass uses its database of more than one billion current and past job postings to identify societal megatrends it sees at play and shaping the kind of work we’ll be doing in the coming years.

According to Sigelman, each megatrend is creating an identifiable economy:

* The Readiness Economy

* The Logistics Economy

* The Green Economy

* The Automation Economy

* The Remote Economy

In the podcast, Sigelman and I go into details on what forces are driving each of these economies—drilling down on specifics about the jobs that will be most in-demand and the skills you will need to get one of these millions of jobs.

“We see that those five economies are going to grow about twice as fast as the market overall. One in six jobs across the whole job market will wind up being in one of those five economies.”

He says some of the jobs already exist, but are changing, as are skills needed to do them. Some of them don’t exist yet, but are being created out of necessity.

I ask Sigelman to share his thoughts on whether we have enough talent to fill the demand that he and Burning Glass see in the coming years?

“The answer is clearly no. When we think about creating 18 million jobs in five years, that’s a huge challenge,” says Sigelman.

“For us to be able to rise to the level of growth that those economies demand, we’re going to need to really rethink how we bring talent to the market. And that’s a challenge not only for education, not only for government, but it’s a significant challenge for companies who, of course, drive our economy today.”

You can hear more from Sigelman on what he sees as not only a challenge but a huge opportunity for workers and jobseekers in the podcast. Listen here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this podcast here.

Episode 172: Matt Sigelman, CEO, Burning Glass Technologies

Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation

Producer: Larry Buhl

Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim

Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, my guest is Sarita Gupta, the director of the Ford Foundation‘s Future of Work(ers) program.

The organization takes a critical look at how emerging technologies continue to change the way we work—both the skills we need and the tasks we perform—as well the very definition of employment.

“Traditional employment is beginning to look more and more like ‘gig’ work, with unpredictable work schedules and more precarious working conditions and rewards,” according to its mission statement. And, as its name reflects, the program is about putting people and their well-being at the center of the discussion around the future of work.

“A core part of the Future of Work(ers) program is the importance of ensuring that working people have the ability to shape policies in their workplaces and the new economic models of our time. And so to that point, worker voice and worker influence is really, really important.”

“The future of work is not just about automation—automation is really important and we know it is taking place—but it’s also about the fissuring workplaces, workplaces that are shifting in these dramatic ways,” says Gupta.

Gupta and the organization believe there is a huge opportunity right now “to strengthen the ability of workers to be able to come together collectively, to negotiate on the many issues that are impacting their lives.”

And she adds, “we are hopeful that there are businesses out there who also understand that it’s in their interest to ensure that workers have a voice and are helping to shape some of the solutions that many of them are challenged with in this moment.”

She says that skilling, reskilling, and training are great examples of where there can be great partnership between workers and businesses, but, Gupta argues, skills and training can’t be the only solution.

“As we ask workers to become lifelong learners and upgrade their skills, we also need to upgrade the quality of jobs,” Gupta tells me. “No one working full time should ever live in poverty. That is so basic yet it’s still not the reality in our country. And that speaks directly to the role of employers and the role of businesses.

“It’s important that we’re creating new jobs. It’s important that we’re bettering the quality of the current jobs in ways that really ensure that workers have a fair chance to survive and thrive in our economy.”

“It’s important that we’re creating new jobs. It’s important that we’re bettering the quality of the current jobs in ways that really ensure that workers have a fair chance to survive and thrive in our economy.”

Gupta emphasizes that the future is fundamentally about people and how we can collectively develop a path to shared prosperity and economic security for all workers. She says the program’s work focuses on workers who have historically been excluded from labor protections—women, people of color, immigrants, many marginalized workers in low wage sectors of the economy in particular.

The Future of Work(ers) program supports various strategies to ensure all workers have a stronger voice in the changing workforce, which you can read about on their website.

Gupta is clearly passionate about ensuring everyone has the opportunity to get a good job and career. That passion comes from her own experiences growing up in Rochester, New York,

WorkingNation has partnered with Cognizant U.S. Foundation to explore solutions to the lack of diversity in the tech industry in a series of podcasts and articles. We’re sharing these stories every Friday through early March here on WorkingNation.com.

You don’t always need a four-year degree to become a software developer. You need the skills. And there are many ways to get them. For example, over the past six years, more than 1,200 people have learned to become software engineers through a seven-month, fully-immersive training program offered by the nonprofit Turing School in Denver. The good news: the majority of them have found jobs doing what they trained for.

“We started with the idea that there were a good number of people out there who had the potential to be software developers, but for one reason or another, never made it onto that traditional (higher ed) path,” explains Jeff Casimir, Turing School’s executive director.

A four-year degree can be costly, he says, and some people simply don’t want to spend another four years in school after graduating from high school. They’d prefer to be working or because of economic circumstances need to be working sooner than later.

It’s a Civil Rights Issue

Even in the midst of a severe economic downturn, there are thousands of open software engineering jobs across the country. But, for people looking to break into the field, it’s tough. Most companies want somebody with three-to-five years of experience and—more often than not—a college degree.

Turing School is turning that notion on its head. It’s giving its students the hands-on skills they need to do the work in a much shorter amount of time than a traditional four-year university. And its building a community around its students and alumni to help them on their career pathway.

In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Casimir says at its heart, Turing School is about civil rights. His driving motivation: “change the game, change the definition of who belongs.”

The tech industry, despite efforts to diversify, still tends to be white and male. Turing actively encourages women and people of color to apply.

“It is blowing open the access doors to who is allowed to have these high-quality careers where you get to do interesting work, work that matters, and you get paid well for it. I think for the vast majority of the tech industry’s history, it’s been a tightly selected group who gets to play on that playground. And that’s just frankly not okay with me.”

Acquiring the Skills, Without the Massive Debt

Casimir says he feels for people that are burdened for a long period of time by massive student loan debts from undergrad and grad school. “The root of the problem, in my eyes, is not the size of the debt. It’s the value of the education. People are accumulating enormous student loan debts—$200,000—and the marginal difference to their salary is $10,000, $15,000. What have you? And so it takes 10 years to break even, 15 years to break even, maybe even never breaking even.”

The seven-month software engineering course from Turing costs about $20,000. Later this year, it will be adding an immersive data analytics class that will cost about $15,000 a year. When Turing started, the classes were held on-campus in Denver. Last year, they switched to remote teaching—still immersive—because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Casimir says the school is switching to fully remote, thus allowing more students to attend from all around the country.

He also says Turing graduates are getting a good retur...

With so many people out of work and looking for a job, it’s understandable that jobseekers are looking for an edge in the hiring process, something that will signal to potential employers the value they bring to the job. And that’s lead to the post-secondary education market being flooded with credentials—at least 967,734 and counting, according to a new report from the nonprofit Credential Engine.

A credential can take on many different forms. Scott Cheney is the CEO of Credential Engine. In today’s Work in Progress podcast, we discuss what defines a credential and why transparency from the credential providers is important.

What is a Credential?

“What we mean by a credential is anything that is intended to help a person tell somebody else what they’re able to do, what they’ve learned, what they’ve been trained to do. It’s anything from a high school diploma, a certificate or a certification, a badge—that’s increasingly popular—degrees of every type, licenses,” says Cheney. “So, those things that you would earn at the end of your education and training that you want to be able to show people (to show) this is what I’m capable of.”

Credential Engine breaks down the credentials into 16 detailed categories across four types of credential providers, as detailed in the report:

* Postsecondary educational institutions – 359,713 degrees and certificates

* Massive open online course (MOOC) providers – 9,390 course completion certificates, micro-credentials, and online degrees from foreign universities

* Non-academic providers– 549,712 badges, course completion certificates, licenses, certifications, and apprenticeships

* Secondary schools – 48,919 diplomas from public and private secondary schools

Why Do We Need Transparency?

Credential Engine’s report doesn’t put a value judgement on each of the credentials. Instead, the nonprofit calls for the organizations and institutions to be transparent about what you will get out of the credential—the skill it represents, how much it will cost you, and your potential career earnings from it.

“It’s not for us to make the determination of which credentials are good and bad, but we want to make sure all of that information is collected and shared openly, because…what is valuable to a worker in Central Washington might be different than what’s valuable to a worker in Seattle,” Cheney tells me.

“Credential transparency empowers everyone looking for education and training options with the data they need to make a well-informed decision, enables employers to better evaluate the value of a credential’s ability to meet business needs, and allow organizations that service students, workers, employers and other stakeholders to provide clearer information about the value of various credentials,” according to the the nonprofit.

These are the Questions You Should to Ask Yourself

Cheney adds, “we want to make sure that we give everyone that information so they can make the best decisions given their conditions and their circumstances and their opportunities. We want to make sure that that information is made transparent and comparable so that others can then help make those determinations of what’s best for them.”

He suggests you ask yourself these questions:

“What do you earn and what are the employment rates? Does a credential actually help you move onto another opportunity, or is it a dead end? What are the pathways and transfer opportunities of that information? Do you have a return on investment?”

Credential Registry

WorkingNation has partnered with Cognizant U.S. Foundation to explore solutions to the lack of diversity in the tech industry in a series of podcasts and articles. We’re sharing these stories every Friday through early March here on WorkingNation.com.

Because of the pandemic, the number of women in the workforce is declining. Still, they remain slightly more than 50% of the U.S. workforce. Despite outnumbering men overall,  they make up less than 30% of workers in tech jobs.

And while women are getting nearly 60% of all undergraduate degrees, less than 20% of graduates in tech are women. That’s even though women in other STEM fields—science, biology, chemistry, the life sciences—is much higher.

Where is the disconnect? Tech industry veteran Judith Spitz says it’s about barriers to access, misinformation about what it means to work in tech, and the notion that it is for men only.

The Role Model Challenge

Five years ago, after an impressive 30-year career in technology with Verizon, Spitz started Women in Technology New York—now known as Break Through Tech—to encourage women to consider tech as an educational path and a career.

“There is a role modeling challenge. Everybody can spit out the names of Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. Very few women come to mind,” she says. Spitz says almost all the stereotypes about tech are wrong, including “it’s only for guys, it’s a loner sport, it’s for people who like to sit alone in their basement and hack code.”

She adds, “Of course, any of us in the tech industry know that couldn’t be further from the truth, because there is nothing in a technology project that isn’t team-based.”

Spitz speaks from experience. She started her career at Verizon in 1986 as part of the R&D lab that developed—as a team—an industry-leading automated customer service system that featured pioneering advanced speech technology. Spitz eventually worked her way up to chief information officer, managing a team of more than 5,000.

Her mission now is to break down the barriers that are keeping more women from breaking into the industry.

The Three Cs: Curriculum, Community, and Career

In this episode of Work in Progress, Spitz explains how Break Through Tech works with large, diverse public education institutions in a city—the first in New York, now in Chicago—to encourage more women to take those first steps, then to support them in their journey.

“It’s about curriculum innovation, which is the what and how you teach introductory (computer) courses in order to cast a wider net and get more women to be willing to walk in that door of that first class.”

“Second, (it’s) around community development, delivering programs that not only create a community of these young women with each other, but importantly, introduce them to a network of professional women in their local ecosystem that these women don’t have access to, in order to help them network and get their foot in the door.”

The third leg of the program is career access. In New York, for example, they work with hundreds of companies to help women get that all-important first break, a paid internship. Break Through Tech innovated the “mini-internship” during the winter or spring terms.

“It’s a paid three-week immersion in a company, attending meetings, learning about the company by talking to the head of engineering, talking to the head of product, talking to HR and so on.”

“The whole idea of this program is,