In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan and I discuss the importance of collaboration in solving employers' problem in finding enough workers while insuring workers find good-paying jobs and careers.

Take health care workers, for instance. The country was already in need of more trained health care workers—including medical technicians, medical billing specialists, dental hygienists, and more—when the pandemic struck and made that demand more urgent. By one estimate, and this is really an astounding number, the state of California will need 500,000 new health care workers by 2024. Again, that is just in California.

The nonprofit Futuro Health is working to fill some of the worker gap in the state through training and certificate programs that brings together all the stakeholders. Collaboration, Ton-Quinlivan who has lead Futuro since it launched in January 2020 says, is the key to success. "One of the misconceptions for many employers is that they have to go at it alone. There's a lot of other parties that can come together and I call it the three-legged stool."

"So, instead of trying to do workforce development where you do everything—setting up the education, finding the diverse candidate pool, and then doing the hiring process—there are actually stakeholders out there from the education institutions to community-based organization and public workforce agencies, who are ready to collaborate and to partner with employers to produce a talent pool that is inclusive, that is reliable, and that is quality. And all of that, there's a formula to growing the talent puddle that you may be facing into a talent pool."

Futuro Health is itself a collaboration. The venture is a partnership between health care provider Kaiser Permanente and the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UGW). Futuro helps identify in-demand careers in the field through tis work with health care providers, does community outreach to attract applicants, then helps match applicants to short-term, affordable, and flexible programs that will lead to jobs in those careers, Ton-Quinlivan tells me.

"There's usually two barriers that stand in the way of adults being able to skill up. The first is affordability. And then the second is flexibility. On the second point, flexibility, that's where it's really important that the education and instruction is delivered in a format that accommodates adult schedule, because adults have all these commitments of family and jobs. We make sure that the shortlist of education providers pay attention to having adult-friendly education and training.

"And then on the former, which is costs, we have fortunately been able to underwrite tuition for the over 4,000 adult students that have been with us, but it's still important for adults to have some skin in the game. They pay a $100 registration fee. And there may be some small ancillary fees, for example, if they need to take a background check or take an assessment test, but we have covered their tuition up to this point."

Ton-Quinlivan says the partner programs are curated to only include programs that will lead to a credential that will put them on the pathway to a good job.

"We're driving towards a goal of credentialing 3,500 healthcare workers in order to repopulate the frontlines. We are delighted that our average age of our students is 30 with 87% ethnic diversity, 36% bilingual. We continue to be able to bring diverse communities into the workforce to address this big number of 500,000 allied health workers needed in California, but there's 2.3 million needed across the country."

WorkforceRX: Agile and Inclusive Strategies for Employers, Educators and Workers in Unsettled Times

As a former vice chancellor for workforce and digital futures in the California Community Colleges system, Ton-Quinlivan is a veteran in the workforce development field and has long been a p...