Talent Tomorrow.

Past the pivot point to new pathways to prosperity...

We’re at, or past, a pivot point in the relationship between employers and education, training, learning and workforce in the United States.  Employers in the U.S. and its allies have an opportunity to accelerate ahead of China by collaborating to scale these new pathways to prosperity.  Employers need to lead – as part of a tightly-networked , trans-national ecosystem of interests.

COVID’s acceleration of remote work and training; an increased dedication to inclusion, equity and diversity since the murder of George Floyd; the inexorable pace of technological change; and America’s new, well-funded America-first industrial policy propelling a new infrastructure decade have created an opportunity for the most significant re-set in the relationship between employers and the education of talent in the last 150 years.  The old path to family-supporting career positions, which depended on large employers recruiting graduates from a small universe of ranked colleges whose education stopped with that degree, is past its sell-by date.

This is as true for the highest tech sectors as for other industries;

“(Success for CHIPS) depends on what might be one of the hardest transformations for the U.S. to achieve in the semiconductor field: a major surge of national, state, and local actions to expand, train, and diversify regional workforces to ensure more workers can participate in the industry’s growth…60% (of these jobs) don’t typically require a Bachelor’s degree…”

That Brookings’ observation applies equally to all of the $80 billion in specifically place-based funding that has been approved and appropriated for distribution across the States.

The NY Times Editorial Board supports these alternative pathways to prosperity;

“See workers as workers, not as a college credential… …If this “degree reset” continues, an additional 1.4 million jobs would be opened to workers without college degrees over the next five years.”

The editorial references the work of groups like ‘Tear the Paper Ceiling’ and Opportunity@Work , which state:

“There are 70+ million adults in the U.S. who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes such as community college, workforce training, bootcamps, certificate programs, military service or on-the-job learning, rather than through a bachelor’s degree. STARs include the majority of Black, Hispanic, and essential workers, as well as veterans.”

This isn’t just, or primarily, an opportunity for America’s cities .  Byron Auguste, the founder of Opportunity@Work, observes, ““No part of the country is more disadvantaged by degree screening than rural America”.

So alternative pathways are politically popular – across the aisle. 

“….“The only bipartisan thing left in this country is apprenticeship, it feels like sometimes,” says Deborah Kobes, who directs the Center for Apprenticeship & Work-Based Learning at Jobs for the Future.”

Governors including former GOP MD Governor Larry Hogan and PA’s newly inaugurated Dem Governor Shapiro are moving fast, abolishing degree requirements and moving to skills-based hiring for all State employees.

It’s particularly important to understand the degree to which the shift away from degree requirements toward skills applies to STEM positions, the fastest-growing and most highly-compensated job category in the country.   A new NSF study finds that fully 25% of all jobs in America are STEM positions, up from 21% in 2011.  50% of these positions -- and the fastest growth categories --  are filled by people with some technical skill– but without a full 4 year science or engineering degree .

The STEM workforce without a bachelor’s degree, referred to as the skilled technical workforce, is comprised of workers in S&E, S&E-related, and middle-skill occupations that require a high-level of knowledge in a technical domain but do not require a bachelor’s degree. These workers hold positions such as computer support specialists, industrial engineers, licensed nurses, pharmacy technicians, carpenters, and electricians.

STEM workforce positions that don’t need a bachelor’s degree are filled by folks who are disproportionately male, and from underrepresented (in STEM) groups. Concerns about male participation in the workforce, and about bolstering underrepresented groups in STEM, are helped by providing alternative pathways into these family-supporting career occupations.

The pace of technological change requires learning to be lifelong, now. This is an added opportunity for employers — and also for traditional education providers. Lifelong upskilling provides particularly valuable career advancement connective tissue today, as corporate culture frays in our post-COVID world of remote work.  As the Aspen Institute’s @upskillamerica says,

“Employers will see returns from investing in employees’ education in the form of reduced attrition, increased promotions, improved engagement and more robust and diverse talent pipelines”.

Tech firms have been leading the way in providing alternative, less-than-degree, available-at-any-time in a career, up/re/new skilling pathways to prosperity;

However, America’s pace along this new pathway to prosperity … is problematic.  Traditional institutions, and their interactions with one another, aren’t getting it done: 

Allison Gerber, the director of employment, education, and training at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, says that employers and higher-education institutions don’t interact as often as they should in part because most employers are small to medium-sized and don’t have the staff to maintain a relationship with local colleges. “The same goes for the education side,” she adds. Colleges need people who have deep industry knowledge to sustain relationships.”

Time to learn fast, experiment , and scale new opportunity, and lifelong learning pathways to prosperity.

As it happens, the U.S. can rapidly learn a great deal from its long-standing allies, many of whom have been doing some of this well for decades.  Germany’s 20,000-firm strong mittelstand (what the U.S. calls SMBs — the term technically covers the systems in Austria and Switzerland, too) is core to that economy, and has thrived in large part due to the country’s apprentice system. 

Europe is moving fast to accelerate skills-based hiring and lifelong learning:  2023 is the “European Year of Skills”, with big goals:

“The European Year of Skills will provide a new momentum to reach the EU 2030 social targets of at least 60% of adults in training every year, and at least 78% in employment. 

The initiative will also help achieve the 2030 Digital Compass targets of at least 80% of adults with basic digital skills and 20 million employed ICT specialists in the EU. “

The World Economic Forum worked with PwC to launch a global ‘reskilling revolution’ this year:

Only 0.5% of global GDP is invested toward adult lifelong learning. This is while Forum research done in collaboration with PwC shows that investment in reskilling and upskilling of the current global workforce has the potential to boost GDP by $6.5 trillion by 2030, while investing in future-ready education for today’s generation of school children could add an addition $2.54 trillion over the same period.

The U.S. hasn’t articulated such bold goals — yet. One promising initiative to accelerate learning, and scale best practices fast across allies is the new U.S./EU Talent for Growth Task Force, announced by Commerce Secretary Raimondo and the European Commission’s EVP Margarethe Vestager in December.

“Competition for technological leadership today demands a well-trained workforce. Training is key to creating broad participation in today’s economy. With the Talent for Growth Task Force, we will learn from each other’s successes and create new opportunities that recognize the talent of our people,” said Secretary Raimondo.”

In addition to the apprentice system (which organizations like CareerWise have been developing the last few years), U.S.-based firms can learn a great deal about supporting the whole employee from their EU counterparts. Providing top career STEM opportunities to women, and family-sustaining lifelong technology careers to folks from underestimated populations, means embracing the whole person — providing everything from child care, mental health, and leave and work-from-home policies to tight social networking opportunities that were historically off limits to anyone who wasn’t white, male, and from the ‘right school’.

American firms are leaning in on flexible work-from-home policies, which lag in some European countries. U.S. tech firms are leading the charge in lifelong, certified upskilling for their employees. Provincial and mayoral leaders with large immigrant populations in the EU can learn from Governors in States that have done away with 4 year degree requirements for hiring and from U.S.-based programs focusing on pathways for underestimated populations like Opportunity@Work, and OneTen.

Both sides of the Atlantic have constraints : while difficult, joint efforts on standards for skill certification and outcome measurements are needed. NIST in the U.S. and the OECD in Europe could productively tackle this over the medium term. Upskilling efforts are too company-specific (Google vs. Cisco vs. Amazon vs. etc etc certifications). A verified catalogue of proven successful initiatives outside of traditional post-secondary education, and a tight network of employers to move those rapidly across allies, will be highly helpful for everyone.

Traditional higher ed institutions everywhere have a huge opportunity — but need to engage. (Sidebar: the first University-as-a-Service which sells a lifelong subscription for folks to dip-in and dip-out for their educational needs (and lived experiences!) — will do extremely well (I advocated that Elon put $5 billion toward this idea rather than buy Twitter — however… ….) )

Skills-based, plug-n-play, lifelong learning – particularly in digestible, certified/trustworthy form — for current and emerging STEM skills — with an emphasis on opportunity for underestimated populations — is the winning workforce strategy for this decade. With a mittelstand-ish dollop of apprenticeships…

Employers — and allies — who learn and move fast and at scale — will accelerate ahead.