Miriam Altman-Reyes: Investing in AI-Driven Solutions for Economic Mobility

Miriam Altman-Reyes: Investing in AI-Driven Solutions for Economic Mobility

Miriam Altman-Reyes, founding managing partner of Brass Ring Ventures, discusses her path from public school teacher to entrepreneur to venture capitalist, and how each chapter informs her current work leading a seed fund and growth studio focused on the future of work and learning. Drawing on her experience co-founding and selling Kinvolved to PowerSchool, Miriam explains how her team of exited operators supports early-stage founders across four investment themes: early success systems, operational efficiency, social capital development, and workforce upskilling and reskilling. The conversation explores how private capital can play a distinctive role in scaling AI-driven solutions for learners and workers, and why the defensibility of technology matters more than ever as larger players enter the education and workforce space. Miriam shares examples from her current portfolio and offers practical guidance for leaders navigating labor market shifts, emphasizing adaptability, mission alignment, and the enduring importance of human skills that AI cannot replace. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Kaitlin LeMoine: In our recent Work Forces episodes, we've looked at the future of work through different lenses, from the technical infrastructure of credentials to the institutional shifts happening at community colleges and national nonprofits. And today, we're continuing our focus on the innovators who are driving these changes by looking specifically at the role of investment in the work and learning ecosystem. Julian Alssid: While we often talk about policy and systemic shifts, it's equally important to understand how private capital and exited operators—or founders who have successfully built and sold their own companies—are identifying and scaling the next generation of solutions, particularly as artificial intelligence begins to fundamentally reshape how we prepare the workforce. Kaitlin LeMoine: And our guest today brings a unique perspective as both a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Miriam Altman-Reyes is the founding managing partner of Brass Ring Ventures, an exited operator-led seed fund and growth studio. Miriam and her team focus on investing in AI-driven solutions that prepare learners and workers for a rapidly evolving labor market. Julian Alssid: Miriam is an expert in the industry who's experienced the full life cycle of a social impact startup. She was the co-founder and CEO of Kinvolved, which she led from its inception to a successful acquisition by PowerSchool in 2022. Her leadership has been recognized by many, including Forbes 30 Under 30 and the New York Times, and she maintains a deep commitment to driving economic mobility for underrepresented populations. Kaitlin LeMoine: Miriam, your path from being a public school teacher in New York City to leading a venture fund gives you an incredible perspective on how to best support innovators and solve for the challenges ahead across learning, work, and economic mobility. We are very excited to have you with us. Welcome to this podcast. Miriam Altman-Reyes: Thank you. I'm really thrilled to be here. Appreciate you having me. Julian Alssid: Yes, Miriam, welcome. And so we've talked a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear in your own words about your journey—the path that led you to found and lead Brass Ring Ventures. Miriam Altman-Reyes: So, I moved to New York right out of college, almost 20 years ago—amazing to say, hard to believe—to initially start a career in education. I moved to the city to teach in a public high school through a program called Teach For America, where I witnessed firsthand many different challenges facing our education system. But the one that really stuck with me because it was just so foundational was student absenteeism. You know, kids who would miss school for a variety of reasons, but at the end of the day, you know, as, uh, as I think we all know, if, you know, you don't show up, it's very hard to be successful, um, in whatever it is you're trying to achieve. And I think of my time in the classroom as really kind of trying to understand some of the underlying challenges behind student absenteeism and the opportunities to solve for it. And I found, from an operational perspective, that there were really two parts of the challenge that I felt that eventually technology could help solve. One was that educators, administrators, parents, and students themselves didn't have access to data to really help understand what's going on and therefore inform interventions to solve the problems. And then, two, that those stakeholder groups were really not able to be in close and regular communication to help, ideally, even prevent absenteeism from happening in the first place, um, because of just a really broken communication sort of system between school and home. So I left the classroom having sort of thought of the challenge—I certainly witnessed the challenge, um, thought of some of the solution possibilities. I actually left the classroom thinking I was going to start a school as I entered into my graduate degree at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. And in the first two weeks of the program ended up pivoting to starting an education technology company. And eventually that, uh, company offered a platform of multiple tools that did just what I just described, you know, providing more real-time access to data and facilitating two-way communication between school and home, really heavily focused on underserved populations where student absenteeism tends to be most profound. And so I led as one of the co-founders and the CEO of the business over the course of about eight years from, of course, idea through eventually our exit, as you mentioned, uh, in your earlier comments. Many different chapters along the way, but, um, you know, and lots of highs and lows, as with any entrepreneurial business. But maybe some of the highlights are that we, first of all, from an efficacy perspective, achieved positive results from three third-party efficacy studies that really showed that our solution did, in fact, work at reducing absenteeism, which therefore had impacts on short- and long-term academic gains, including graduation. Also, we became a profitable business, even though we did raise financing over the years from a number of different sources—from venture capital to debt financing to strategic sources, um, you know, grants and others. We did become profitable, um, before we were acquired. And we were a business that sold our software to arguably one of the hardest, uh, you know, buyers that exists, that's K-12 schools and districts across the US. And at the time of our acquisition, we had customers from small rural districts to New York City public schools across about half of US states. So it was a really great run, um, and super proud of the work that we did. I then stayed on at PowerSchool, who had acquired us, which then had recently gone public. We were their second acquisition as a publicly traded company, as primarily in the role of Vice President of Go-to-Market Strategy and Partnerships for their New Solutions Group, which essentially was spun up around the time of our own company's acquisition, with the goal being to help develop more, um, sort of organic growth to help offset a lot of the acquisition-related growth that PowerSchool, um, had become famous for over, you know, many years. Uh, and so I reported to the Chief Product Officer and worked on launching four products across the entire ecosystem of PowerSchool's, I think, maybe 25 to 30 products in total. So really got that much broader perspective after having been so specifically focused on building my own business and my own problem set for many years. And that was certainly, by, um, opportunity and also by design. But ultimately, I decided that I really wanted to be closer to the early stage, closer to the ground, and closer to the impact. And also had, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit in some ways never dies, and so I knew I wanted to start something, uh, new again. And so I left PowerSchool just about three years ago to start Brass Ring Ventures with the initial idea being that as a founder, you know, I had incredible mentors, advisors, and board members who were exited founders and operators in their own right, and they knew exactly the right time to provide support, how to provide support, how to push, um, and also how to let me sort of like lead and learn, um, as a first-time, uh, CEO. And I realized in talking with dozens of other founders that were earlier in their journey that that experience that I'd had was particularly unique. And I also was really fortunate that I had a team of exited operators and founders in my last business's executive team that wanted to work together again. And so we came back together as partners in Brass Ring Ventures, both the studio and now in the fund. Um, I'm sure we'll go into more, but that is a little bit of how I got to where I am today. Kaitlin LeMoine: What a cool and amazing story, and certainly can see how you draw upon so many of your lessons learned across your eight years, I think you said, in that kind of startup space. I'm curious—you started to speak more of the importance of having coaching or mentorship as you were designing, you know, a new venture. And so I'm curious to dig a little bit more there and talk about, you know, what specific challenges in the future of work and learning is Brass Ring Ventures looking to solve through both the investment strategy and also the growth studio? Miriam Altman-Reyes: So, over the, you know, last three years of working with several dozen companies at this point, into which we've invested in a handful and that number will continue to grow as we continue to have, uh, additional capital deployed through our fund, we've identified four core themes that we're, you know, looking to support both through the studio and then the studio really is a mechanism to feed into the investment fund, so they sort of go hand in hand. And so we invest across the life cycle of the learner, as we describe it, so everything from early childhood through K-12 age, learners through higher ed and sort of alternative pathways, uh, and even into workforce and adult learning. Um, so the idea being sort of helping people continue to improve and, you know, gain access to new opportunities in the professional, you know, um, and ultimately economic opportunity and mobility, um, which is sort of the overarching theme of what we're looking for in our fund from both an impact and a financial return perspective. So those four themes, um, sort of align to those age segments are: first, what we call early success systems. So those are technologies that are helping prepare our youngest citizens and and early learners for their first formal schooling experience, and or solutions that are helping parents and caregivers access quality, affordable childcare, which then in turn has a really important impact on workforce retention as well. Uh, there's lots of data and studies out there showing, particularly for women, um, but not exclusively women, that, uh, there's many people who are leaving the workforce because they're just finding that the the sort of cost trade-offs are not there, um, to kind of stay in the workforce. That's the first theme that we're investing in. Second are solutions that are really helping drive operational efficiency for some of these, you know, more institutional, bureaucratic institutions, like K-12, like higher education, even into sort of workforce corporate environments, helping these institutions do more with less, primarily leveraging AI, you know, in ways that really work for them and can drive more productivity and efficiency as budgets in some ways are getting, you know, shifted and constrained. Third are solutions that are more learner-focused that are helping learners develop what we call social capital skills, and that would encompass skills and tools that are helping people develop like emotional intelligence, um, social-emotional connectivity, communication skills, things like, uh, creative thinking, problem-solving, critical thinking. All these things that, you know, AI is not going to replace and arguably that the worker today and tomorrow needs to be even more adept in as AI becomes more of a solution to replace some of the rote skills that are, you know, existing, especially in entry-level or even mid-level jobs. And then fourth are solutions that are helping upskill and reskill both the current and the future workforce, um, which is very aligned to that third theme. So we're really excited, and again, these themes are both, uh, aligned to what we've seen as our, you know, working by working hands-on with companies in these different areas, but also really validated by the research much more broadly, uh, that shows that these are areas that are not only impactful to society as a whole as we're seeing these like major shifts and we're just at the tip of the iceberg, but also are going to drive, you know, a financial return, really kind of that doing well by doing good concept that I wholeheartedly believe in. Julian Alssid: Wow, that's a—that's a pretty broad mandate you've given yourself there, Miriam. So, given where you sit now as CEO and managing partner, what are some of the most exciting innovations that you're seeing in the early stage EdTech work and in and in the market more broadly? We'd love to hear some specific examples. Miriam Altman-Reyes: So, we just invested—our first fund investment in a company called Doowii, uh, which is basically pulling together data from many disparate systems and making it immediately actionable and sort of, um, uh, helping inform decisions both in the K-12 and higher ed institutional, for the institutional kind of buyer and user. So they fit nicely into that operational efficiency theme that I had mentioned is one that we're looking to invest in. Really, you know, interesting company, you know, have a number of partnerships that they developed early on, um, that really helped them drive growth and expansion, as well as working directly with schools and districts. And so, we think there's really high potential for Doowii, you know, and companies like that in the sector, and that's why we're excited to make our first investment in them. We're looking at a company as well that we're excited about that I probably can't name by name, but it may be illustrative of some of of what we're seeing, that is, um, developing, you know, similarly kind of AI, um, workflows and supports both training and upskilling, as well as like, (for example) financial management capabilities for small business owners. Um, small business, you know, represents more than half of our workforce and continues to grow, especially as again, sort of the corporate workforce is changing, and people are looking for different types of working dynamics and environments and opportunities. But a lot of, uh, a lot of small business owners are not necessarily like CFOs by background, right? Uh, and so there's a huge opportunity to help them really build bigger and more successful and sustainable businesses through leveraging tools like this, and then also help scale and upskill and reskill their employees, um, as well. So, those are a couple of examples. There's also a number of companies—one that I did an angel investment in, several others we're looking at that are more in like the social capital development space. So, there's a company called Hiveclass that basically has a sort of whole full spectrum solution for both mental and physical health and wellness for K-12 specifically as at least a starting point, which is really unique. There's a lot of kind of social-emotional development and mental health, uh, content and platforms that are available to K-12. There's less in the physical education space, but, you know, maybe some competitors. But there's really no one who's bringing these, the physical and the mental health together, which is again, really foundational. If you don't have your physical and mental health as a baseline, it's very hard for, you know, students to be successful in school and and therefore to build the habits that ensure that they're successful, you know, longer term as they become employees into the workforce. So, there are so many companies. I mean, I look at, you know, dozens of companies in a week, and sometimes even in a day. Um, but that gives you an idea of some that I think are really exciting in the market. Kaitlin LeMoine: So, you mentioned, Miriam, the impact of AI on your work and and how you're thinking more about, you know, what are the uniquely human skills that we can all help to build in a time and space where AI is perhaps doing the more rote work more readily? But but there are these unique human, human capabilities. Just curious to hear how your work has shifted even over the last few years around the technology piece of how you think about your investment strategy, because I would imagine there's some shifting that that happens and continues to happen. I'm sure across your work, but that's one area that, when you mentioned it, I was like, "Oh, let's talk more about that." Miriam Altman-Reyes: Absolutely. Yeah, it's a really exciting time, I think, you know. Certainly there's there's a level of uncertainty in times like like today's, but I think I'm extremely excited, you know, just thinking only in just the last three years of working with, several dozen companies, at this point, you know, even though we've, if we just start there, right? Since we started Brass Ring, I think, you know, the kinds of companies, um, the access to development of technology and like the ability to to invest in R&D with, you know, limited resources is so much broader than it used to be, at least to get kind of initial ideas developed and out the door. You don't need to hire a full engineering team at that stage, right? And then as now business continues to evolve and grow, you can get so much more out of a smaller engineering team today than you could even five years ago because these engineering teams themselves are using AI tools, for example, to help facilitate the development of the products that they're building. Which, of course, again, if we're talking about operational efficiency, it helps them, you know, do more in fewer hours than they ever could have done, you know, before without these kinds of tools. So, I think, you know, access to technical talent, um, at a reasonable price is definitely expanding. There's obviously the flip side where, you know, people are raising huge amounts of money in certain, you know, sectors and industries and investing tremendous amounts in technology development as well. If we're thinking really specifically about our sectors and sort of the stage businesses we're in, I think it's really like largely a really positive outcome we've seen. I think the flip side is that because it is so much easier for anyone, uh, to kind of develop technology, uh, you know, to some degree or another at least, the defensibility of technology is something that we scrutinize a lot more than we used to. We always did, but it's just something you have to look at much more carefully and closely, you know. What is the real moat for this solution? How do we know that some of these bigger players are not going to be able to, you know, easily displace, um, the existing solutions? And also, these bigger players are paying a lot more attention to education and workforce-facing technology than they ever have before. The Googles of the world had EdTech, but, you know, arguably are investing a lot more in really influencing, uh, and building tools to help shift how, uh, school operates and how the workforce operates in a way that they weren't doing, you know, 5, 10, 15 years ago. There's just a lot more attention paid, so the competitive risks are much higher. So, you know, that's an interesting dynamic that we're seeing as well. You know, and just the proliferation of technologies out there as well, right? Like where there may have been, I don't know, 10 upskilling and reskilling solutions 10 years ago, now there's 100 or 1,000. And so, again, just being able for founders and and these companies to be able to, A, you know, get a chunk of the market early, and B, differentiate and really communicate their unique value proposition and also, you know, their their team's unique perspective and skill set and lived experience and how it sets them apart and sets them ahead is more important today, I think, than it, you know, ever has been in the past. So, those are a couple of things that we're, you know, noticing. I think, you know, people talk a lot about valuations as well in venture, um, you know, when it comes to AI-driven solutions. I think, you know, in certain industries certainly we've seen, you know, valuations go all over the map. I think in future of learning work, generally, they've been fairly right-sized, which I think is good for the industry overall, um, and, you know, not extremely overpriced, frankly, uh, which I think just sets like these companies, founders, and their investors up for longer-term success as we navigate what the future looks like as well. Julian Alssid: As I understand it, you take a pretty hands-on approach with your portfolio companies, and it'd be really interesting to hear you talk a little about the sort of hurdles, the common hurdles that you see founders that founders face building their for the future of work and but also how do you help them address these challenges and scale? I mean, you know, you gave a little, you gave us a little taste of what it was like for you going through the trials and tribulations of startup land. How do you keep them all sane? Miriam Altman-Reyes: I'll answer that in a few parts. First of all, the most common things that we see founders need right out the gate are support with sales and go-to-market, just, you know, increasing their revenue, figuring out their revenue operations, talent acquisition, etc. Everything that, their narrative, their presentation, everything that's tied to top-line increasing their growing the business. Tied to that is also making sure that their retention of the existing customer is also strong and there's an opportunity for expansion. So that's sort of the whole bucket, I would say, is like revenue and growth. Um, and that usually is number one, uh, even if there are different flavors of just like what kinds of things that founders need help with, and uh, where I personally have a background in, you know, sales and go-to-market, just from sort of learning on the fly, no- nothing formalized, uh, in my like professional training, um, early, uh, schooling training, I guess, but just for like lived experience. Um, and we have several members of our team including an operating partner focused on growth who's served in several leadership capacities who, you know, together we take a really hands-on role with founders on that particular sort of area. The second, I would say, is everything related to kind of, um, you know, cash flow operations, financial management, and fundraising. Uh, you know, those kind of all go hand-in-hand to some degree. We find a lot of times that founders in our sector, future learning work, come in with incredible lived experience, and you can't teach lived experience. So to me, that's incredibly important. But very little business experience, you know, in business acumen. And so, uh, the good news is that you can teach those kinds of skills, right? Like how to review financial statements, how to create financial projections that are, you know, based in realistic assumptions, um, how to execute against those, um, how to adjust and scenario plan if you don't hit your revenue target, right? Like when, you know, how do you make sure that the company can continue to sustain itself? You know, how do you model in fundraises, right? Like when's the right time to fundraise? How much should you fundraise? From whom should you fundraise? What should the valuation of your fundraise be? What are the KPIs and milestones you need to hit along the way to warrant a fundraise? So there's so many different pieces of the puzzle that come together all related to the financial side. And so, our lead operating partner, who's also on our investment committee, Sumit Singh, uh, is in charge of that work, and he and I, you know, work really closely together as well, but he's kind of our our numbers guy, um, in a de facto kind of a fractional CFO. So, we see those areas initially as areas of support that founders most often need, and then for myself, a lot of what I, you know, I'm a generalist, so I touch a lot of different things, but a lot of like leadership development as well, helping founders kind of put a mirror up, um, understand how they're, uh, coming across internally, externally, um, how to strengthen their own narratives and ensure that they're able to get their goals achieved. And communication is just so critically part of that, and also just how you lead and manage all these different stakeholder groups, not just employees, but your customers. If your customer has a frustrating experience, you know, how are you or how are you coaching your team and how to respond to that? So many different examples like that, right? Like board communications and management, um, and sort of generating positive results from, you know, board engagement is another, you know, really common topic that I find myself supporting founders on. So, those are kind of the initial areas, and then we have—I mentioned a couple of our operating partners, but essentially, our model is that we have seven operating partners outside of myself, each of whom have gone through—most of them were on my former executive team, as I vanished before, so we've got a really great track record of working together, and most of them had served in some capacity in leadership through at least one other acquisition across the sector, if not two or three in some cases. Really just like an incredibly seasoned, um, and active operating team, not people who retired 10 years ago and are sort of, you know, meeting with founders like ad hoc once a month. Like, we're meeting with founders usually at least once a week in some capacity, um, when we're working with them, and sometimes more often than that, sort of really roll up our sleeves and supporting them. Our model is typically that pre-investment, we work with founders in what we call our, um, sort of a Phase 1, like more of an advisory capacity. We're getting to know founders, getting to know their businesses. They're also getting to know us and ensuring that they feel that there's strong value-add. And our goal is to come to a decision typically in, you know, ranges in terms of the time frame, but anywhere between like three and six months on average as to whether it makes sense to invest or not. And again, also opening that door to the founder, their self, to make sure they feel that we're a good fit before we get into a long-term relationship, which is what making an investment ends up being. And then post-investment, we usually invest at the seed stage, so typically when companies are like half a million to wiki 3 million in annual revenue, sort of how we define that on a very simple, simple metrics, uh, revenue metrics basis. Post that round of investment, we'll go even deeper as fractional executives, really helping professionalize the organization, um, with the idea being that we're helping the, you know, each kind of department function clean up a bit, um, prepare to bring in, you know, full-time staff and offboard our own team, and ultimately prepare for their first institutional fundraise, which is the Series A. And then in that Series A, things have gone well, then we'll do follow-on as well and continue to support the business in that way. So, it's a, you know, there's nuance to everything, and there's certainly like an acceleration component to it. People often are like, "Is this an accelerator? Is it a venture studio?" It's neither of those, that's why we've called it this Growth Studio because it's something a little bit different, but it certainly pulls elements from, um, from both of those, really with the goal being to again, sort of help provide that exited founder, exited operator guidance and expertise that many investors just don't have to founders that goes beyond just, you know, providing capital to to the business and, helping them grow. Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I would—I could see that sort of support being invaluable. Like, each of those stages is so distinct, and the needs become, I feel like they change almost before your eyes, right? Like, we're just we're just putting this together, it's a startup. Wait a minute, there's this whole other bucket of things we never even thought we'd have to do, and now what do we do? And so I can imagine that your hands-on approach and focus on being a Growth Studio really resonates for a lot of founders because it's like, you don't really know what the challenges are until you're in it, right? Like, um, until you're kind of looking around that corner, you can't always anticipate what the challenges are going to be. Miriam Altman-Reyes: Absolutely. Yep. That's a big value. Kaitlin LeMoine: So, Miriam, what's a piece of practical advice or a couple pieces of practical advice that you would offer our listeners, whether they come from more of an investor space or as educators or or entrepreneurs, to help them become forces in navigating labor market shifts or, you know, like you can take it in the direction of navigating changes as you're running an organization, whether it's small or large? I will let you decide where you want to take your reply. Miriam Altman-Reyes: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, back to like some of our investment themes, honestly, I think leaders at any type of organization, whether it's a startup or a larger entity or a school or a, you know, a consultancy, whatever your your sort of work is, um, and wherever you are, frankly, in the hierarchy, I think adaptability is so critical and and that social capital is so important. You know, having a network of people that you can, you know, go to to both continue to build relationships, get a, you know, sense of what's going on in the industry from their unique perspectives, um, what are the opportunities, what are the things that you should look out for, um, what are the skills that you should be developing, what experiences that you should be, you know, garnering, etc., for example. I think that that's really, really critical, and so again, just sort of, you know, having that social capital, developing those social-emotional skills, that social capital, um, and being able to be adaptable in, you know, today's market and honestly, I think the market for many years to come is going to be a requirement for people to be successful and continue to kind of stay ahead of what's going on and not be caught flat-footed. So, you know, that just takes, you know, critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills and, you know, having the head space as well to take a step back and sort of understand what's happening both on a micro and a macro level. Um, so, it's a lot of different moving pieces, but I think again, that advice I would give to founders, but I would give to people in a lot of different areas of the economy, frankly, you know. Policy makers as well, I think that's really important. And then, I think the other thing, more from like a team management perspective, is it has never been more important, even though I think it's always been important to find people that are incredibly mission-aligned to whatever it is that you are trying to do, right? What's the end outcome or end goal of what you're working on, what you're building, what you're developing, the policies you're implementing, etc. And ultimately, are the people mission-aligned and truly passionate about the same, you know, solving that challenge because, hopefully again to one of those themes that, you know, we're investing in, you know, as as things change and shift, you know, people will have the opportunity to upskill and reskill, but what you can't teach is passion, right? Ukulele can't teach someone how to care about something. You can give them experiences, but whether it's going to resonate with them or not is not a teachable thing. And so, that's always something that I would suggest, you know, certainly looking for. Um, it's a—it's an exciting time, uh, but it's definitely a time to keep your head on a swivel and, uh, you know, just keep paying attention to, you know, what's going on and try to kind of stay ahead of the curve as much as you can. Julian Alssid: And do you consult consulting firms? No, just kidding. We're, um, you know, this is like this is our—welcome to our lives. It's it's it's I think, and we know we're not alone because we talk with a lot of people, but it is a world in, you know, it was always challenging starting a business, and I think, you know, this world now is a world in flux. Miriam Altman-Reyes: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we get requests, you know, to support lots of different kinds of organizations and entities, frankly, some of which we don't have the ability to say yes to because, you know, it's just a little bit outside of our wheelhouse. But, you know, nonprofits are dealing with, you know, these same challenges, for-profits, early-stage businesses, later-stage businesses, um, you know, PE-owned companies, public—I mean, it's just everyone is trying to figure this out in their own flavor on, and I think like ultimately, the the skills and sort of attributes as as a leader that you need, um, are similar, just how you apply them might be slightly different each context. Julian Alssid: Yeah, so true. Um, so Miriam, thank- thank you so much for taking the time today. This has been a really great conversation and soaking it all in. Um, how can our listeners continue to follow your work and, you know, your initiatives? Miriam Altman-Reyes: Yeah, thank you for asking. You know, we're both through Brass Ring Ventures' page, as well as through my own page. We're very active on LinkedIn, also on Instagram. I would say those are the two kind of, um, social channels to where you can find us. Um, so it's brassring.vc is our website, um, can also find more information there on us. And then my name is Miriam Altman-Reyes with a hyphen, uh, where you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, or Instagram like I said. And then for founders, and in particular, who are looking, uh, you know, for potential investment opportunity or support through our Growth Studio, by going to our website, you can find, um, on the upper right corner, um, and throughout the website, access to apply to join our Growth Studio, which is a short, less than 10-minute application, um, and we'll, you know, always review and get back to get back to founders always within a week or less. Kaitlin LeMoine: That's great. Thank you so much for those very practical next steps for In other practical next steps for our listeners as far as how to continue to follow or become involved, perhaps, with your great work. Really appreciate you taking the time to join us today, Miriam, and for sharing so many thoughts throughout this conversation. And we look forward to remaining in touch. Miriam Altman-Reyes: Thank you so much. I appreciate the conversation, the opportunity, and I also look forward to staying in touch. Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and especially thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Work Forces Consulting practice, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Philip Weinberg: Scaling High-Impact Workforce Solutions

Philip Weinberg, President and CEO of STRIVE, discusses the organization's intensive, evidence-based model for workforce development. Drawing on his background in government and the private sector, Weinberg explains how STRIVE blends rigorous professional training with long-term "lifetime" coaching to help individuals facing significant systemic barriers move into family-sustaining career paths. The conversation explores STRIVE's rapid national expansion to 14 cities and its strategic approach to scaling without compromising quality, including the use of anchor employer partnerships to backward map training for high-demand sectors like healthcare, construction, and logistics. Weinberg emphasizes the necessity of ongoing coaching and social supports as the "secret sauce" for helping students thrive and discusses practical steps for building more inclusive talent pipelines. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforce's consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our workforces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Julian Alssid: Kaitlin, in so many of our recent conversations, we've discussed how workforce development has moved from being a fringe topic to a central economic imperative. Over the past few years, there's been a real shift toward a skills-based ecosystem where the goal isn't just a one-and-done credential, but creating sustainable, family-sustaining career paths. Kaitlin LeMoine: It's true, Julian. And while the policy and tech landscapes are moving incredibly fast, we keep coming back to the importance of the human connection and social supports as the true secret sauce for helping students persist and thrive in this new economy. It's not just about the technical training; it's also about the foundational skills that allow learners to pivot and grow over a long-term career. Julian Alssid: Which is why we're so thrilled to have our guest join us today. Phil Weinberg is a leader who's been at the forefront of this work for years, proving that high-quality, intensive training can fundamentally change the trajectory of lives and communities. Kaitlin LeMoine: That's right, and the breadth of his experience is what makes him such a powerful voice on this topic. Phil is the President and CEO of STRIVE, and his career has spanned the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Before taking the helm at STRIVE in 2011, Phil was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as President of the New York City Workforce Investment Board, where he oversaw workforce development services for the nation's largest workforce area. Julian Alssid: Phil's journey also includes significant leadership in education reform and private sector experience at the management consulting firm Bain & Company. That range of experience is exactly what he's used to lead STRIVE through a period of growth and renewal. Under Phil's leadership, STRIVE has scaled to 14 cities, focusing on helping students facing significant systemic barriers across the workforce. Kaitlin LeMoine: STRIVE has become a model for how to blend rigorous professional training with the long-term coaching necessary to move people from entry-level jobs into sustained careers. We are so happy to have you with us today. Welcome to the Work Forces podcast, Phil. Phil Weinberg: Thank you. Really thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. Kaitlin LeMoine: So, as we dive into the conversation today, Phil, we'd love to hear you tell us in your own words a bit more about your background and the journey really that led you to your role at STRIVE. Phil Weinberg: Like many people, my journey has not been a straight line. As you've described it, it's been across multiple sectors: corporate, government, and now nonprofit. And I think like a lot of people, I entered the corporate sector thinking that was where the innovation was happening and if you wanted to do big things in social impact, that would be the platform to do so. And I had an early experience, my first time working in government in Chicago—and this was, to date myself, back in the 1990s during the sort of welfare-to-work reform era—and I had the incredible fortune to work with some audacious, courageous, visionary leaders within government working across sectors. For me, it really opened my eyes to what's possible and the ability to do big things from government and across sectors. So, I once again found myself within city government, as you noted, working in the Bloomberg administration here in New York City, focused on helping uplift individuals and access career opportunities that could, in fact, change their lives and their families' lives. Whether it was on the education reform side, as you noted earlier, or on the career pathways economic mobility side, my career has always been focused on the question of how do we help individuals gain opportunity, advance in their lives, and how do we create communities that are more just and more equitable? And so, I'm sitting in city government, I got a call from a recruiter, and it turned out that STRIVE—which at that point had been around for about 25 years—had been a leading workforce development nonprofit. Its CEO was transitioning, and they were looking for someone to lead STRIVE into the future. And so, I came up to visit the team, I stepped into a classroom, and I was totally blown away by the power and depth and quality and engagement of what I encountered. And so for me, I just imagined how powerful it could be to take that model, expand it in New York City, and ultimately to consider how we could scale that in partnership with additional communities around the country. So, that's what landed me here at STRIVE. I am almost 15 years in and really grateful and energized to be part of this organization and part of this work, as you noted, in advancing economic mobility in communities nationally. Julian Alssid: So, STRIVE has grown and I guess serves about 2,000 students now, and you have a goal of serving 10,000 with support from your investors, like Blue Meridian and others. We heard you talk about using an evidence-based approach. So, how are you going to use an evidence-based approach to ensure that your really exponential expansion there doesn't compromise the quality of outcomes? Phil Weinberg: Well, I appreciate the question. You've actually perfectly hit upon the real tension, I think, for any organization that's considering taking a quality model and bringing it to scale. And so, I'd say that tension between quality, scale—I'd add a third component, which is the economics of scale—how to ensure that as you do grow and expand, that happens in a way that's economically sustainable. And I'd say for us, the focus on quality as we scale is first and foremost rooted in our values. As an organization, what do you believe? What's your true north? How do you ensure that you hold dear to those principles and those values and that all decisions really flow through that filter? More practically speaking, for us, it starts with having built an evidence-based model in partnership with our research partners at MDRC. So, building a comprehensive model that's built on the best evidence—in our case, it's predicated on the work-advance model. And so, ensuring that we are confident in the evidence base upon which our work is structured. Once we built that foundation, it then is incumbent on us as we grow to think about what elements of that model are essential to remain consistent across our communities we serve, and where do we see a need to be contextualized? In many cases, we see tremendous value and opportunity to contextualize the work that we do within our community partners—so, partnering with community colleges and other anchor institutions as a way to ensure that as STRIVE expands, we're doing so in a way that is authentic and resonant within the communities we serve. Investing in infrastructure. So, clearly there is delivering great programming, but then there is as you scale, having the infrastructure to support scaling with quality. What does that look like? These are often the not-the-most-glamorous aspects of operating a nonprofit, but often some of the most essential. Having strong performance systems and financial systems and data systems; having the operational backbone; having the programmatic support tools to ensure that as you grow, the support system is in place to grow thoughtfully and with quality. And I guess the last thing I would say is really growing with an eye toward being a learning organization. That certainly is one of our values at STRIVE, which is we've got a deep history to draw upon. Over four decades of service, over 90,000 students served. While there is that very deep reservoir of history of practice, we also approach the work with a great deal of humility, which is: what are we learning? What is the labor market telling us? What are the kind of policy context changes telling us? And how do we as an organization adapt accordingly so we can maintain quality and focus even as we grow? So, not an easy feat, I won't claim that we have sort of honed this, but we are certainly with a values-driven approach committed to that endeavor. Kaitlin LeMoine: So Phil, you've given us much to think about and dive into further during this conversation. I think one thing that, you know, would love to hear you talk a little bit more about are both the individuals you serve and also the programs you offer. So, we'd just love to hear a little bit more context there, especially as we think about, you know, like you're saying, the complexities of bringing these programs to different geographies and settings. Phil Weinberg: Absolutely. So STRIVE serves individuals who are talented, motivated, eager to work, and oftentimes have just found themselves facing steep obstacles—often multiple obstacles. And so, we serve a broad range of individuals 18 and older, men and women. People often come to us unemployed, mostly on public assistance, often facing obstacles like food insecurity, housing insecurity. Our average age is about 30, so we have many parents or those who are supporting minors. And so, we recognize that our students come to us with lots of aspirations. They've oftentimes found themselves in a revolving cycle of dead-end jobs, and the question is how do they break through? And so, the model we built is really one that provides a platform to support those individuals in gaining the kind of habits and behaviors to succeed at work, and also the skills and credentials and supports to be able to enter entry-level positions that have good jobs, the opportunities for advancement, and to support them in accomplishing their goals. I guess the one other thing I would note is that among the obstacles our students face, nearly half our students have been impacted by the justice system—whether they've been direct incarcerated and returning from incarceration. And I'd say one thing we've done programmatically is really ensure that we are meeting our students where they are. So, we've over the last decade worked with real intention to ensure that we are focusing our programmatic model and our interventions exactly where our students need them most. So, we've got, to your question about what are our programs, we've got our flagship program, which is our career path program. It supports a wide range of students to build careers in the healthcare, construction, and logistics industries. Those for us have become real areas of expertise. But then we noticed that about a third of our students had been coming to us justice-impacted and from incarceration, and as a learning organization we asked ourselves, are we doing enough for this population? And with that, we engaged with kind of the leading thought partners we could find and built what we now call our Fresh Start program, which is designed for adults coming home from incarceration. For us, that's just a recognition that those individuals are facing other obstacles—family reunification, search for housing—in ways that perhaps our general student population is not. And so, we've based on the work we've done at Rikers Island and with a number of correctional departments and partners, we've been honing and delivering this program for years and we're now in the process of replicating this. We just launched it in Birmingham, Alabama, the first time outside of New York City. And I'd say the last thing I would say is that we also noticed about a third of our students were coming to us as young adults, 18 to 24 years old. We asked ourselves the same question: are we doing enough to support the successful outcomes as a data-driven, kind of evidence-based organization? And what we did is we decided to kind of completely revisit and interrogate our programming for these young folks. So, we invited in thought partners who specialize in positive youth development, our research partners at MDRC, and we reconstructed based on our core programmatic pillars a model that we now call our Future Leaders model, which is specifically designed for 18 to 24-year-olds. This is a model that's probably been implemented in upwards of 15 to 20 communities serving thousands of young people across the country over the past decade. Julian Alssid: So, in your efforts, Phil, working with healthcare, construction, logistics, my understanding is that a key part of the model involves working with employers—sort of anchor employers—to map or backward-map capabilities into the programming. Can you speak about how that takes place? How do you keep current? You know, we do a lot of work building those bridges between education and training organizations and employers and it just feels like a constant process of trying to keep up. How do you do it and ensure long-term success? Phil Weinberg: Absolutely. I appreciate the terminology backward-map. In many cases, it feels like that is in fact the work that we're doing. So, it started with a very intentional selection of the sectors within which we work. We work with a terrific group of thought partners to determine where do we see opportunities in the labor market where there are good jobs with good wages and conditions for good jobs and advancement potential where you do not need a post-secondary degree in order to get your foot in the door in order to be able to then advance? For us, that in fact led us to healthcare and to construction and to logistics. But there's the concept, there's the labor market data and what it tells us and where we think there's opportunity, and then there's what, as you were noting Julian, the real world tells us—our employer partners, where there's actually demand and what the skill sets and competencies that graduates would need in order to be able to succeed and stand out and thrive in the workplace. So, for us, that starts with partnerships and listening closely to our employer partners. I'll use healthcare as just a brief example, and I'll use our kind of backyard, our flagship site in New York City and in the community of East Harlem. The largest hospital in East Harlem is called Mount Sinai, now part of Mount Sinai Health System. And they were trying to increase their community hiring and they were also trying to fill roles that they had found difficult to fill in their medical and billing system. So they reached out to STRIVE. This was not an area of expertise for us at the time but a real area of aspiration. This is over a decade ago, and we said we would love to co-create something with you. So we built a pilot, and the pilot was to serve a small group of 15 students to be able to access positions to operate those medical billing and scheduling systems. To fast-forward, it was a huge success because we started small, we co-created this in partnership with the human resources team—so, this was not a notion of doing something charitable or philanthropic; this was a notion of being a good community partner, a good community citizen as a hospital, and also trying to tap into untapped talent pipelines. I mention that example because that kernel, that seed that got planted really became the basis of a much broader-based partnership with that hospital system as they grew in a range of positions that are really positive entry points into healthcare careers—patient care positions, billing and coding positions, environmental positions, dietary transporters. The quality of those relationships, listening to our employer partners, understanding their pain points, understanding where they have hiring gaps... In fact, it was then in the pandemic when they said, you know what, we don't need the positions that you've been partnering with us on, but we now need to transport equipment and supplies across our system. Can you help us? And so, we leaned into that opportunity and that helped us build out a robust logistics pathway within our health partnerships and also beyond. For us, it really is about rooting in the partnership, listening closely to the human resources teams. When we now engage with new communities about where and how STRIVE might be able to make a difference, those are always predicated on deep partnerships, mutually beneficial partnerships with anchor employers. I'll just use the example of Ochsner Health in New Orleans, which has been a phenomenal partner of ours. I'd say the ingredients that make a partnership strong—and this is certainly true at Ochsner, it's true at Mount Sinai and many of our hospital system and other employer partners across the country—one is they inform our training, so they're co-creating with us the training and credentialing that's going to be needed for someone to enter and then stand out in those roles. Two is they're working with us on the recruitment process, so they're not guaranteeing our students positions, our graduates, but they certainly are committing that if we're producing quality graduates, that then there will be a pathway into their hiring system. Some of our hospital partners in fact have STRIVE listed on their dropdown menus for their hiring teams. And then I'd say lastly, just a really honest and candid partnership based on two-way communication: where is this working, where is this falling short, constantly iterating to ensure that we're learning lessons together, we're doing this in a way that is building strength and trust in the relationship and ultimately deepening partnerships and extending those into other domains. Kaitlin LeMoine: As you seek to expand and broaden your reach across states and regions, I'm wondering, do you also look at different industries as well? Because I can see, I mean, this is such an intensive process you're talking about. So, are you thinking you're going to focus in those three areas long-term, or do you also look to, you know, what are the emerging industries or areas of opportunity across different regions? Phil Weinberg: Absolutely. So, you must have been eavesdropping in our planning conversations. We're going through some intensive planning. I'd say a couple things. One is that we are always exploring where else do we think we can contribute to a local talent ecosystem and where do we think STRIVE is distinctly equipped to be able to do so. In many cases, it's by developing depth in areas where we feel like we are particularly well-suited and our student population is particularly well-suited. But as you noted, there's lots of shifts in the economy, there's lots of disruptions related to technology, and so it constantly challenges us to think about are there other industries or in some cases other occupations within industries where we're seeing increases or spikes in demand and where we think STRIVE might be particularly well-suited to support that? I would say that one of our ethos as an organization, we do try to be responsive and agile to the changing market conditions, but we try not to be overly opportunistic in the sense that it's okay to say no. It's okay to look at an opportunity, say that is certainly a need that the employer or the community has. Are we best equipped to support that community or those sets of employers to fill those needs? Those are the conversations that we're typically having as we think about ways in which we can deepen our impact and broaden it within current and new communities. Julian Alssid: Phil, so STRIVE is known for its support model, which I guess continues over time with your students. Can you speak a bit about the model and why do you see it, how does it fit and how is it part of the secret sauce of STRIVE? Phil Weinberg: Thank you for the question. I think Kaitlin, you had referenced early in the discussion the notion of human connection. Even in a world that is being disrupted rapidly by technology—and all organizations, including STRIVE, are actively assessing how to best incorporate that into our operating and programmatic models—we're also mindful that the communities we serve often respond best when there is a deep level of human connection. So we built a model predicated on five pillars. The first is an intensive work readiness model. It's a three to four-week workshop focused solely on building the workplace habits and mindset to succeed at work. People often call these soft skills; we know these as anything but soft. This is professional communication, managing conflict at work, working within teams. That really gives our students the leg up, not just to get the job but also to succeed once in the workplace. The second pillar of the model is our occupational skills training. This is ensuring that we are working with employer partners, assessing labor market conditions to ensure that our students are credentialed in a way that gives them access and hopefully a leg up within the hiring process. Third is our coaching. This is an important ingredient because so many of our students do come to STRIVE encountering so many obstacles, both professionally and personally, that the coaching model for us is an incredibly important way for us to help them understand and navigate through many of these challenges, whether it's related to childcare or food or transportation or navigating their entanglements with the justice system. The fourth pillar of course is our partnerships with our employers. So this is our job placement assistance. And our last pillar is another we call part of our secret sauce, which is our lifetime support. I would note that there is, to go back to your question about scale, there is such a temptation in the workforce arena, particularly how incentives are structured, to be transactional—look for short-term milestones. We know that if you're really committed to the notion of economic mobility for everyone—and for STRIVE that means individuals that often face some of the highest hurdles to accessing and thriving in good careers—then we've got to build a model that's in it for the long term and that supports students not just at the entry point but coaching them on the advancement. For us, that is ensuring that getting that first job is a great cause for celebration, but it's not the final destination. Once our students get that first job, we're sticking with them and supporting them as they're navigating through complexities in their lives and as they're looking to upskill and advance within their careers. So it is a holistic model, it is a long-term model, it's a very human-centered model. For us it means our students build a great sense of community at STRIVE and a great deal of trust. And for us that's a very sacred principle that we work really hard to preserve and to celebrate even as we grow. Kaitlin LeMoine: And building that network, I feel like is so critical for many reasons including that, you know, as we let off the conversation with, careers are not linear, jumping from one job to another. So having that sustained network is an invaluable component of your program model. We like, given that the show is called Work Forces, we like to have a question that asks about how others can be forces in the work. And so Phil, we're curious to hear from you, what are a couple of practical steps you can offer our listeners who are looking to become forces in building inclusive talent pipelines or helping populations who are facing barriers to navigating the job market? Phil Weinberg: I would note one of your opening comments, which is this is an important time to be committed to this work. It does seem that there is a recognition across sectors—policymakers, corporate employers, philanthropic—that if we're really going to live up to our values as a country of fairness and justice and opportunity for all, then we've got to build these pathways that allow everybody, regardless of circumstance, to access careers and opportunities that can allow them and their families to live dignified lives that have the potential for advancement. So there's room for lots of actors and players. There's a tremendous amount of energy and activity. We have the great fortune at STRIVE across our communities to partner with organizations big and small. So what I would say is no matter where one finds themselves, whether a person or an organization, it's really being clear about, you know, beginning with the end in mind. Julian, this is the backward-mapping that you talked about. When you think about the talent ecosystem, what are we trying to accomplish? What are the objectives? What are the incentives of the various players? What are the funding opportunities? And then that allows each person or organization to take a really clear-eyed view of, like, where do we fit? Where could we add value? Is there a role for us here? What is our superpower as an organization? And that means listening really closely, not just coming into a situation with a solution in mind, but having some hypotheses or having some areas where you may feel like you can contribute, but sometimes those assumptions get disrupted in the course of engaging with partners across sectors. So being really intentional about when you bring a clear solution into a conversation versus when you're bringing a kind of appetite to co-create and problem-solve as part of a larger ecosystem. The partnership development—this is capital, and it gets built during the partnership development process. None of us can achieve any measure of impact unless we do it together. This is with other nonprofit partners, governmental partners, employer partners, philanthropic partners. So really investing time in building those relationships, building that capital, listening closely, understanding where there might be additive value to contribute. Again, there are many instances where we at STRIVE say, you know what, we're not sure we're a suitable addition to this partnership or to this effort to advance mobility, or are there ways we can be a thought partner, you know, but it may not be an appropriate setting for us to establish operations. And I'd say one other thought is the notion of dreaming big but starting small. This was the Mount Sinai example that I noted. It sometimes can feel really frustrating when there are big, grandiose ideas being discussed and yet, you know, sometimes it's not clear what the starting point is. For STRIVE, whether it's launching a new site or launching a new program, we like to start small. We like to start, test, pilot, learn. Many communities have been exhausted by the promises and the commitments that have been made and not delivered upon. Our commitment is we want to ensure that we are delivering upon any commitment that we make. We're not falling short. We're building confidence that the early steps we're taking have the potential to grow and snowball into larger commitments. So there's lots of practical ways and practical steps that any person or any organization can take to do so intentionally and to be open to the co-creation and the opportunism that can emerge in the course of a collaboration. Julian Alssid: So Phil, as we wind down our conversation, how can our listeners, as you dream big and continue to move in the direction of expansion here on the national level, how can our listeners follow you, continue to learn more? Phil Weinberg: Certainly any listener can come to us online at our website at strive.org. So that's an easy way to plug in and get a sense of our programming, where we are, how we're thinking about the landscape of economic mobility. Can certainly follow us on our social sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. Sign up for our newsletter. Come visit one of our sites! If you happen to be in a city or visiting a city where STRIVE has a presence, we would welcome you to come. Our approach is a partnership model, so we welcome partners of all kinds, we welcome thought partners, learning communities. We invite folks to come in and, you know, you never know where those conversations can lead. Kaitlin LeMoine: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Phil. I feel like I'm taking so much from this conversation. I love that dream big, start small and really deciphering where you're going to play versus what you're not going to play, maybe, and making intentional choices on both sides of that line of thinking. So, really appreciate this conversation today. Thank you so much for joining us. Phil Weinberg: Thank you. Thank you both. Julian Alssid: Really appreciated your taking the time, Phil. Thanks. Phil Weinberg: Great. Thanks. Take care. Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and especially thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you are interested in learning more about Work Forces consulting practice, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Ian Roark on Integrating Academic and Workforce Learning

Ian Roark, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Workforce Development at Pima Community College, discusses the institutional shift to merge academic affairs and workforce development into a single integrated system. Drawing on over 25 years of experience in education leadership, he explains how Pima is eliminating the traditional silos between credit and non-credit programs to create a cohesive educational model for all learners regardless of their point of entry. The conversation explores how the college uses an economic development lens to align legacy programs and new initiatives, such as specialized centers for excellence, with long term regional industry needs. Ian shares how Pima has supported the regional transition to an advanced manufacturing hub by integrating skills like optics and photonics into technical programs and expanding offerings in building construction, technology, and aviation. He highlights the importance of funding workforce development teams through general budgets rather than requiring them to generate their own revenue, which encourages deeper collaboration with academic faculty. Finally, he outlines how viewing workforce development as a paradigm rather than a series of programs enables community colleges to serve as the primary engine for regional economic mobility. Transcript Julian: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher ed, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Kaitlin: In some of our more recent episodes, we have focused on the technical requirements for making credentials portable and transparent. While data standards and credential portability are essential to strengthening educational pathways for learners, many higher education institutions also still operate with an internal wall, so to speak, that separates credit programs from noncredit workforce development offerings. Julian: Yes, this separation can be difficult for learners to navigate. We often see degree programs and short term training operate with different funding structures and institutional goals. Breaking down these silos is an important priority for community college leaders. Kaitlin: And our guest today is leading institutional efforts to address these challenges. Ian Roark serves as the Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Workforce Development at Pima Community College. He brings over 25 years of experience in education to this role, spanning K12 leadership and community college administration. Julian: Under Ian's leadership, Pima has been at the forefront of workforce innovation through the development of specialized centers for excellence and new models for apprenticeships and community college baccalaureate degrees. Ian also serves on a number of boards and committees at the local, state, and national levels. Notably, he was named to the Aspen Presidential Fellowship for Community College Excellence in 2019, called to serve on the Higher Learning Commission's Credential Lab Innovation Design Team in 2024, and has advised numerous organizations, including New America and Education Design Lab. Kaitlin: At Pima, Ian is implementing a no wrong door strategy to ensure that every student has a direct path to economic mobility and higher wages regardless of where they begin their education. Welcome to the podcast, Ian. We are happy to have you here. Ian Roark: Great, thanks Julian and thanks Kaitlin. It's a little embarrassing at times or humbling to hear a little bit of your biography read out loud, so I just want to start off by saying it's an honor to serve Pima Community College and our southern Arizona community in this role. And none of those things would have ever happened if it weren't for the amazing work of the team that supports me, administrators as well as our amazing faculty and staff at the institution. And I'd like to give a special shout out to our chancellor, Dr. Jeff Nasse, to whom I report, as it was his idea to merge academic affairs and workforce development under this combined role as provost. And so really excited to speak with you and the audience around the journey that we've been on at Pima Community College for this past 11 years and counting. Kaitlin: Well, we can't wait to dive in with you on all of that today. Ian, to get us started, can you please tell us in your own words a little bit more about your background and the journey that led to your current role and work at Pima? Ian Roark: Yeah, sure. I like to start off by saying I've been in school since I entered kindergarten. I haven't worked in the private sector ever, although a lot of my work has engaged the private sector quite often, especially in the workforce development roles that I've held in the past. So it's, you know, interesting to spend your whole entire, you know, working life and school life in school, both in K12 and in higher ed as a student and as, you know, a staff member, faculty member, and now administrator. I sometimes, if I had to compare myself to like what is your specialty, I'm sort of a Swiss Army knife of education in ways. I started off as a music teacher, I have a music degree. I quickly went into getting certified in K12 to teach social sciences and I've taught everything from sociology to psychology to history to world, you know, world geography and world history. I did a lot of curriculum work in K12, really outlining entire scopes of sequences from kindergarten to seniors in high school on learning outcomes and how those could be assessed. Went into administration in K12 as a Career Tech director and I had campus principal oversight over a technical campus, so really got to do a lot of operational work in working with faculty and working with students. My first role in higher education was as Dean of Career and Technical Education at Odessa College in Odessa, Texas, and just would like to give another shout out to my sponsor, mentor, and friend, Dr. Greg Williams, who is still president at Odessa after all these years, who opened the door for community college work and really opened my eyes. And then the community college experience really just, I fell in love with it. He promised me that you'll never want to do anything else when you enter community college, you're going to want to stay here until you retire, and so far he's been right. Just what we do at the community college world. So I served as Dean and then Executive Dean at Odessa College. I entered came to Pima Community College in 2015. Then we were structured as six quasi-independent campuses, each with a president reporting to our then-chancellor Lee Lambert. I reported to one president, but I was the first matrix vice president, meaning the institution was rigidly structured around these campuses and the reporting lines at these campuses, and the intent all along was for my role and the team that I built to start working cross-functionally across all these campuses with deans and faculty to break down barriers and silos as it related to serving employers in our community and ensuring that our learners had pathways to upward mobility in key industry sectors. And so my role has evolved over all of these years. I was Vice President of Workforce Development, then became Vice President of Workforce Development and Strategic Partnerships, then Vice Chancellor of Workforce Development and Innovation, and then now this past year serving both as acting and now non-acting provost and executive vice chancellor. And really the journey all along has been pointed in the direction of what you outlined, which is breaking down these artificial barriers that in higher education we put up, right, these firewalls between credit and non-credit, between workforce programs and academic programs. These are things that we've constructed on our own, in part because we're incentivized by our accreditation systems, by our federal financial aid systems to do so, but also because it's fall, spring, summer, rinse, repeat. Higher education is a very, going back to my music roots, rhythmic, right? There's a rhythm that's always underlying the operations. And it goes back, as you know, to an agrarian calendar, to Carnegie units that are named after a prominent individual who literally created it just as a way for us to account for the time we spend doing things in higher education. So once those things are set, it's very hard for us to break it. But at Pima we're doing some really interesting and amazing work, not just because it's interesting and amazing, but because we have seen firsthand how eliminating these silos and breaking down these traditional firewalls is what's best for our students, what's best for our community, and ultimately allows us to fulfill our mission at Pima, which is to empower every learner for every goal every day. Julian: Well, it seems that the big firewall is the academic affairs and workforce development separation. And so Pima's made this strategic decision to merge these worlds with you now at the helm of that effort. Can you speak with us a bit about the reasoning behind the shift and how it supports this idea of a no wrong door approach for learners? Ian Roark: Yeah, really right. So at the end of the day, whether a student is coming to Pima Community College for adult basic education where they want to earn their high school equivalency because perhaps they dropped out of high school or had circumstances that impacted that educational journey or put it to a stop, whether they're coming to us for non-credit workforce training, or as we're starting to refer to it as professional credit for upskilling and reskilling opportunities, or they're coming to us for a credit-bearing certificate or a degree in career and technical education, and/or still a primary mission of transfer—two-thirds of our students on any given year are coming here because they want to transfer and primarily to the University of Arizona, we are proud to partner with them of course here in Tucson—at the end of the day, they're not doing that because they want to earn college credit or get a certificate, they're doing these things, they're choosing Pima because of what's at the end of that educational journey, whichever door they enter. It's because they know that whether it's earning a certificate, earning a degree, getting an industry-recognized credential, or completing the Arizona General Education Curriculum to transfer to one of our state universities, or earning a full transfer degree and then transferring, they're doing all of these things because they know at the end of that there's a better job opportunity. And so at the end of the day, it's really about workforce development whether we call it transfer, whether we call it workforce development, whether we call it career and technical education. Our students are seeking and earning these credentials because of what it does for them and their households, which is a better pathway to upward mobility. So we really need to start framing all of it as workforce development. It's not this dichotomy that we have erected and then perpetuated. It really is workforce development for all of our students. And it's great that our transfer students want to pursue transfer degrees. We want to ensure that they're making those choices though in a career context. And so a little bit of our work this past year has been working across academic affairs and in partnership with student affairs to look at what the first-year experience looks like for all of our learners. And so starting next year, we are having a more career-focused first-year experience and onboarding process for all of our students. And one of our strategic plan goals that's emerging out of our current strategic planning process is: what would it look like if every single learner at the college, whether they're a transfer student, even in a traditional area like psychology or economics or a STEM field like engineering, what would it look like if every single learner had an opportunity to have a work-based learning experience or an experiential experience tied to real-world application as part of their program of study? And that's kind of how we're approaching it. That could be the reality, especially when we start to think about the impact of artificial intelligence and things like XR or AR/VR technology—how can we even use those sorts of technologies to bring those real-world applications into the classroom if we can't physically tie every single student to an internship or a job shadow per se? So those are the things we're thinking about, already putting in place with respect to the first-year experience. And it's really an exciting time to see how, really across the college, faculty in particular are embracing this. I know that Julian knows one of my partners and a team member, the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Workforce Development, Amanda Abens. She's traveling with one of our journalism faculty in a transfer program to a journalism conference to talk about the unification of workforce development and the academic piece in this particular program of study. And so we're seeing people really embrace the idea that this is not a dichotomy. We are one family, one team focused on one mission, which is to better serve our students so that they can accomplish their college and career goals, whatever those may be, as long as they are tied to a pathway for upward mobility. Kaitlin: So to that point, the last point you just made, how are you working to ensure that the pathways that are set up lead to tangible outcomes like wage gains, while making it easier for students to stack those skills? Because I think what you said earlier about really all of this learning is workforce development in some ways, I think really resonates for us. I mean, we have talked about that, Julian, I feel like numerous times just about, at least at the high level of, man, it feels like now more than ever education is—the point is like, how do we think about how to develop talent and what does that look like? And how does it look like to develop the workforce of the future? And so when you said that, it really resonated with me. But I'm curious to hear a little bit more about what is your thinking behind building for those tangible outcomes. Ian Roark: Yeah, in the opening Julian mentioned the centers for excellence that are at our now five campuses at Pima Community College and we are seeking to open more. But we have over the past decade been opening these centers for excellence that are not only extraordinary physical locations of great magnitude with respect to career technical education and increased square footage, top-of-the-line state-of-the-art technology working with industry to develop our programs, but it's also concentrating programs on a single geography so that faculty can co-create programs together aligned to business and industry. And we've done a lot of great work in the workforce development and technical education space, so we've started a lot of new programs with exactly what you said, Kaitlin, in mind, which is: what are the pathways that are aligned to the economic development priorities of our community and that lead to opportunities for increased wages and upward mobility? I won't go through all of them, but I'll talk about some of them. And I do want to put it in the context of the difference of workforce development in the here and now and workforce development with an economic development lens, because there is a difference. Workforce development here and now is really about our institution's ability to respond to whatever request business and industry brings to us today. So my ability, my team's ability to respond to whatever request, say you or Julian brought for Kaitlin as a potential employer, hypothetical employer in our community, is really based on whether or not we foresaw that request coming. So we can only respond with the capacity that we have now, which is based on past strategy. Our current strategy that is rooted in economic development means partnering not only with business and industry but business and industry associations, our economic development partners—for us that's the Chamber of Southern Arizona, the economic development offices of Pima County and all of our surrounding municipalities, including Tucson, suburbs—and really learning about where community leadership, civic leadership wants Tucson and Pima County to be ten years from now, twenty years from now, and designing our programs with that mindset at the forefront. So pictured behind me is an example of that. That's a over 100,000 square foot advanced manufacturing training center that was conceptualized in 2017 in partnership with business and industry, opened two years ago, and it was built under the prospect of: we are becoming an advanced manufacturing community. Ten years ago we weren't, we were a call center community. Now the predominant number of economic development leads that our partners bring to the community are in advanced manufacturing. And so we built this center not because it's an awesome facility and has lots of cool things in it like robots and lasers and optics and all these things, it's because we knew that's where the civic leadership wanted the community to go, and now we have the ability to train at scale for any employer partner that either relocates or expands in our community. So that's been the trajectory over the past decade. Areas like advanced manufacturing, IT cybersecurity, the new health profession center of excellence. But right now we also have a challenge, Kaitlin, which is we are over 50 years old, almost 55 years old as an institution, and we have a lot of legacy programs. We're having to look at those, say, is this really the best way to offer this program to our learners? Is it really the best program for us to have? Is it really aligned to business and industry? So I'm sure like many listeners of this show, we have our program review processes that sort of answer those questions on a four-year cycle of program review for every program. But by merging academic affairs and workforce development, we have brought in all of the expertise of the workforce development team into the program review process to help the academic affairs professionals answer that question and do it together. Right? Previously that really wasn't the case. Academic affairs had its own process and workforce development over here, we were starting lots of new programs in partnership, but we really didn't have a role in assessing and validating all of the existing legacy programs. And so the unification of academic affairs and workforce development really allows for the opening of the door down to a very detailed and rigorous level of depth and engagement analyzing the outcomes of programs not only in the traditional context of persistence, retention, and completion, but labor market alignment. Is this credential actually what is required to get the job that this program purports to allow students to get? And is it really a good return on investment for the individual learner, their household, and the community at large for us to be offering this program at this price point? Perhaps there's a different way we can offer it. So that's just a little bit about how we're thinking of both the starting up of the new programs in a center of excellence context, but looking at the legacy programs that we have and being really judicious on how we answer those questions with respect to market-driven curriculum. Julian: It is such a challenge. When you first started talking about, you know, like fall, spring, summer, rinse, repeat, you know, having spent my time in community college and working a lot more on the workforce side, it isn't, as you know, that is not necessarily the same calendar, you know? Like if you're responding to workforce needs, they happen when they happen. So I'm still interested, I mean I get the idea of kind of bringing rigor to try to figure out how legacy programs fit, but of course your team, your faculty, you know, they did not sign up—the academic faculty by and large didn't sign up to like responding to the flavor of the day or the technology of the moment. And so how do you begin to reconcile the two in actuality and practice? Can you give us an example or two? You know, so for example, I mean I'll say in our world, we're doing some work now with community college that, you know, like many, kind of their manufacturing programs sort of go away on the credit side because like, who's going to wait all that time to get a degree when you can go out and get a decent job with less training? Now there's kind of this resurgence. How do you bring these programs back, both for short-term credentialing and for longer term? How do you do it? And yeah, can you give us an example or two? Ian Roark: Yes, certainly. Of course it varies by program area, right, because these things are not monolithic across even career and technical education, let alone traditional transfer programs. Every industry is different, and I think that's the first thing we have to keep in mind is let's work with our industry partners to really truly understand what's going on in their particular corner of the labor market and then ensure that we are responding in kind. Because a credit program is certainly not the answer to every labor market issue, and neither is a short-term training program the answer to every labor market issue. It really is industry-specific and market-driven. And so of course the cornerstone of that is partnership. So if you're not—if faculty and deans are designing programs without the input and connections that the workforce development internal partners bring to the table with respect to not only advisory committee members but again the thinking that economic development partners and workforce investment board partners and, you know, community-based organization partners bring to the table with respect to the diversity of people that we're serving in our community, then we're really designing programs, you know, in isolation and perpetuating sort of those stovepipes if you will. So of course it's industry alignment first and foremost. But then how we approached it at Pima—A because of resources and just the necessity of it, but B understanding that if we're going to eliminate these stovepipes, these silos, that we didn't start building short-term or not-for-credit or professional credit upskilling/reskilling opportunities in isolation of our full-time faculty and deans. The strategic choice that we made intentionally all along was that we are going to shelf all of our white labeling and third-party non-credit offerings. Right? That's not Pima. This may not be the case for every other community college, and I'm certainly not suggesting that every community technical college should or could do this. But for us, based on feedback we got from employers and frankly non-credit students in 2020 when we were working with the Education Design Lab to develop our Pima Fast Track program—short-term non-credit programs that wholly stack into our certificate and degree programs—the feedback was: do away with all of the white labeling things that you're doing and invest in building non-credit programs that are unique to you, Pima. And so we understood that the only way we can do that is to engage not only our industry partners but our full-time faculty and our adjunct faculty who are subject matter experts. And so all of our non-credit offerings that we offer through our divisions are designed and developed by our full-time faculty and adjunct faculty in partnership with business and industry, and then they are taught by those same individuals. And if we can't find an adjunct faculty member in the existing pool, we of course work with industry partners to recruit, as do many community technical colleges, from our advisory committee or other partners to teach those courses. And so a prime example, just yesterday evening, super excited, we did a ribbon-cutting for—you can't see it—a building behind the building pictured is our new building construction technology facility that our Dean Greg Wilson of Applied Technology and department head faculty member John Gerard, like really co-led in terms of developing and opening. It's 20,000 square feet under roof for HVAC, both residential and industrial, plumbing, electrical, so on and so forth. It's an amazing facility, and it was a long time coming. But during the ribbon-cutting speeches, it was recognized that the building construction technology faculty and team don't only serve the credit-seeking students that will be taking classes now in that new facility. They are actually teaching classes at what's called the Humberto Lopez Family Foundation Center of Opportunity, which is a residential facility for the unsheltered people in our community. They are delivering building construction technology training at that facility offsite in a non-credit fashion. They partner with our instructors that teach in our state penitentiary system, who we're also delivering our certificate programs in construction technology at that site. They've partnered with Habitat for Humanity to do offsite work related to building tiny homes for people who need shelter in our community. And they do non-credit workforce training fast track programs in this new facility, as they did in the old, and also provide the related technical instruction for apprenticeship. So just in that example, and by the way, I forgot, our building construction technology faculty also work with our adult basic education team on offering what's called Integrated Basic Education Skills Training, or IBEST, which is where people who don't yet have their high school diploma are taking college-level building construction technology courses that are co-taught by reading and mathematics faculty and building construction technology faculty in the same class—not at the same week, like literally in the same class, these co-designed classes. That's preparing them to pass their GED and earn a college certificate all at the same time. That's just one program. That's building construction technology. So that shows that when you have the mindset of innovation but the open hands of partnership between workforce development and academic affairs internally, right, how faculty and teams will respond. They are truly offering their curriculum in every way you could imagine just with that one example. And I could go on with others, but you asked for one, Julian. So, you know, shout out and congratulations to them again for the ribbon-cutting event that we had yesterday, and they deserve the accolades because they truly are living out what you're talking about. In building construction technology, there is no wrong door, no matter who you are in our community. If you want the outcomes that that program provides, you will find an open door. Julian: It really is striking how many pathways into that programming there are and that you've built in direct response to community needs. I mean, I'm wondering, you know, what happens when perhaps there's a workforce development program or offering that maybe aligns with multiple academic programs? How do you go about navigating that? I don't know how much of a nitty-gritty question that is, but it feels like, wow, I mean there's a lot of transferable skills and transferable content knowledge, right? And so what does that look like? Ian Roark: Well, we just had—we literally just went through a whole entire process to answer that question for what's called the optics industry here in southern Arizona. So optics and photonics is a very important enabling technology that is in many different industries. For those that aren't familiar with Tucson and southern Arizona, we have a large operation of RTX, or aka Raytheon, here, which is advanced manufacturing and integrated integration with respect to aerospace and defense. We also have a lot of maintenance and repair operations in aviation technology and then from there we have just a lot of small and medium-sized suppliers in advanced manufacturing that serve as a hub to these primary industries. And then also we have medical device manufacturing with Roche Ventana here in Tucson. Roche is an international company. Optics is a central integrated technology in all of these different fields. And so we were approached by what's called the Optics Valley, an outgrowth if you will of the Arizona Technology Council, an entity that we partner with often and rely on with respect to their expertise and engagement with all of the technological fields throughout Arizona and especially for us southern Arizona. And at first the conversations were sort of what we experience a lot in community college, which is: there's a labor market need for this specialized skill set among optics and photonics technicians, you need an optics and photonics degree. But we started looking in working with the group and on analyzing the labor market and what optics and photonics technicians actually do, and at the end of the day, we all came together in not only consensus but agreement of, right, a degree program for Pima in optics and photonics might be a thing down the road, but what we're seeing is that these are additive skills to programs that we already offer in our automated industrial technology and manufacturing programs. And so together we co-created some upskilling and reskilling opportunities in the professional credit space that we have already launched. On April 27th, we will launch our first round which is basically the fundamentals of optics and photonics and then over the summer, handling and logistics with respect to optics and photonics. And so it was a prime example of what you talked about—like we didn't really need to start from scratch. We already had a lot of programs that were 70, 80 percent aligned perhaps, you know, pulling numbers out of my hat, but like a lot of alignment already, but we were missing key pieces. And that means we were missing subject matter expertise among our faculty and we were missing the equipment needed to make up the rest of that gap. And so by partnering together, we have our subject matter experts with new adjunct faculty, we have new equipment that Optics Valley helped us acquire, and it's been a great partnership. And so a shout out to Katie Schwartz from Optics Valley, and again Dean Wilson and his faculty, and our workforce development team under Assistant Vice Chancellor Amanda Abens, who really came together to again co-create something that was market-driven and aligned to exactly what the industry was requiring. Julian: Wow, I have so many questions, Ian, and I think we may have to have like, you know, a chapter two, chapter three, because you're just—it's amazing what you've been doing for years, and so cool to see the latest iteration and have this catch-up. For our audience, for our listeners, what practical steps can you offer, you know, whether they're higher ed leaders navigating organizational change and policy and economic changes, or employers looking for deeper partnerships? You know, what practical steps can you suggest to help these folks better align their work with one another? It's really to serve our learners and the workforce. Ian Roark: To my colleagues and peers who are in positions of leadership and decision-making at your community and technical colleges, you know, thinking around—thinking about workforce development not as a series of programs, but as a paradigm is the first step. Right? When you think of—like it's workforce development—and so you automatically picture somebody with a hammer or a welding torch or, you know, a ratchet set in an automotive technology lab. That really feeds back into the stereotypes of, in this corner we have workforce development and in that corner we have our academics. Right? You really need to think about workforce development as a paradigm. How is your entire institution and all of the programs that you offer aligned to the labor market, whether it's at the certificate, two-year degree, or bachelor's degree level? Even if you're only offering the first two years of a bachelor's degree in your transfer programs, are they actually aligned to the bachelor's degrees that your community needs with respect to economic development and upward mobility? So workforce development not as a series of programs, but as a paradigm. And then secondly, right, are you investing in your workforce development team or are you expecting them to earn their own revenue? A strategic shift that we made at Pima Community College is that we generally fund as a part of the regular budget our workforce development team, because 11 years ago that team was charged with "selling" non-credit training, and what we discovered was they're selling a product our industry partners in the community didn't want or need. They want some of that, but not enough to sustain an entire workforce development unit. What did our business industry partners want? They wanted new programs, apprenticeships, certificates, degrees, buildings, all of the things that a revenue-generating self-sustaining unit wasn't empowered to do, wasn't funded to do. And so we removed that sort of disincentive for workforce development to partner with academics by saying, we're going to generally fund you. And the commitment that we made back to the institution is you will see the development of new credit programs, new non-credit programs, apprenticeships, grant-making opportunities, philanthropic partnerships through our Pima Foundation because we're gaining credibility with business and industry which opens that door, and now which you're—like again, a physical manifestation behind me—new things at the college that nobody 15 years ago would have even thought possible. And true to our word, we have delivered at the institution on that promise. By investing in workforce development and thinking about it as a paradigm and not a series of programs or an isolated self-sustaining unit over in the corner, we have shaped the trajectory of the entire institution. Importantly, right, we have credibility with business and industry. We can always do more, we can always do better, but we have gained a lot of credibility with business and industry and that's important not only for the reputation of the institution but again back to our mission, what we're really about, which is opening the doors for people in our community to pathways that they never would have imagined themselves setting foot on. Places where they can go from abject poverty, not having any education at all, to being able to sustain entire households with the earnings that they have in these new and exciting occupations that we are now aligned to be able to provide that education and training experience for. You know, it really is—those are the two things, and I know I brought it back to the mission—but workforce development as a paradigm and invest in your workforce development team. Don't leave them out there gnawing on leather on some shipwreck, like, you know, as they're trying to cross the Pacific Ocean. Give them the tools they need to help the rest of your college achieve its mission. Kaitlin: Well, thank you so much for those very practical steps. Really love the focus on really this holistic intentional strategy that allows for teams to be working cross-functionally and really as you're saying, right, like everyone rises when we have a chance to collaborate in such a not only cross-functional but just mutually beneficial way both for people within the institution, for the learners, and for the community at large. As we wind down the conversation today, Ian, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work and the innovations and great efforts happening at Pima? Ian Roark: Yeah, usually I would say I post a lot on LinkedIn, it's the only social media outlet you'll find me in. I've been a little busy with this joint role of academic affairs and workforce development, right? We're still reorganizing, we're still figuring some things out, so I'm a little behind on the LinkedIn posting, but LinkedIn is a great place to see some of the things that we've done and I will start posting again at some point soon. And, you know, occasionally appear on podcasts such as this one, so I'll take Julian up on the offer for part two. But again, it's been an honor and a privilege to represent our college on Work Forces podcast and so again, a special thank you to our board, to again our chancellor, Dr. Jeff Nasse. It was, you know, he was the one who said, yeah, we're going to go one step further than you've already taken this, we're going to merge academic affairs and workforce development. And so just a special thank you to Chancellor Nasse and his leadership. And finally again to the team that really is—works with me and supports me in our work, right? We have an amazing leadership team, the provost leadership team, but also our faculty and staff. Without our faculty, who do what they do in the classroom each and every single day, the college wouldn't exist, right? People don't sign up for Pima Community College because there's a provost or any other position, they sign up for classes because there are faculty who are doing amazing things in service to our students each and every day. And that's just excited again to represent all of our team here on this podcast. Julian: Thank you, Ian. It's really been a great conversation. Ian Roark: Thank you so much. Kaitlin: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Work Forces Consulting, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Audrey Ellis On AI and Higher Education Transformation

Audrey Ellis, Founder and Principal of T3 Advisory, discusses the strategic and human-centered implementation of artificial intelligence across higher education. Drawing on extensive experience in college policy and institutional effectiveness, she explains how institutions can move from isolated experimentation to a comprehensive AI strategy that supports all learners. The conversation highlights findings from a national study titled AI for Institutional Transformation, which was conducted in partnership with Complete College America and funded by the Gates Foundation. Audrey describes artificial intelligence as an accelerator of existing institutional challenges, such as disorganized data and limited human capacity, while identifying specific opportunities for positive impact, including in the areas of student advising and financial aid. She introduces open practical tools for leaders, including an AI adoption rubric and a survey suite designed to capture feedback from students and staff. Audrey encourages leaders to take a proactive approach to AI use, emphasizing the importance of establishing clear rules to foster safe and effective experimentation. These efforts can lead to the automation of routine administrative work, allowing educators more time to build the human connections that support student success. Transcript Julian: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforce's consulting practice through weekly discussions. We seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher ed, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Julian: Kaitlin, AI has become such a pervasive topic. It seems to make its way into every conversation we have on this podcast, on this planet, from skills validation to credential transparency to workforce development. But there is a conversation that we haven't had in some time. How are colleges and universities approaching AI implementation? How are they approaching it not just in the classroom, but across the technical infrastructure that supports running these large complex institutions? Kaitlin: Yes, that is a critical question. We hear a lot about AI experimentation from faculty piloting tools to students using AI when studying or completing assignments, but less about the coordination and decision making challenges underneath it all. How do institutions move from pockets of experimentation to a holistic strategy? And how do they address the human capacity, governance structures, and academic considerations required to scale AI responsibly? Julian: Exactly. And that is where our guest today comes in. Audrey Ellis is the founder and principal of T3 Advisory, where she partners with higher education institutions on AI strategy, change management, and student centered process improvement. Her research focuses on AI adoption, institutional transformation, and addressing initiative fatigue in the higher ed. Audrey has co-authored numerous publications on AI and student success and frequently delivers keynotes and workshops on technology, equity, and education. Kaitlin: Audrey holds a doctor of management in community college policy and administration from the University of Maryland Global Campus, an MS Ed from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA from Tufts University. Audrey brings both consulting and firsthand institutional experience leading effectiveness, strategic planning, and student success initiatives at community colleges. Welcome to Work Forces, Audrey. We are so glad to have you with us today. Audrey Ellis: Thanks. It's great to be here. Julian: And though we gave a bit about your background, we would love to hear you tell us a bit more about who you are and the journey that led you to founding T3 Advisory. Audrey Ellis: It's an honor to be here and really excited to talk about this ubiquitous topic of AI in every industry, really. And I think that's what makes it interesting in higher ed, right, because we serve all the industries. So it not only is appearing there, but in how we make all of our decisions on campus these days. A little bit about me, I started T3 a little over three years ago. I am from New England, Massachusetts. We are focused on supporting institutions that are access oriented, so they really serve the vast majority of students in this country in their postsecondary experience, but that often don't get the same resources allocated to them as the elite or more well-funded institutions. So that looks like community colleges, minority serving institutions, and regional publics primarily. Especially because those institutions are making a tremendous amount of decisions that need to be made around AI and often with less resources than, you know, their peers at other institutions that we hear about more often in the news. So really trying to create more knowledge sharing among those access oriented institutions so we can all learn together right now, because I think we need to face the reality that we're all a little bit of a student when it comes to AI. Feel like every morning I'm starting a new course because the tool changes overnight, it seems. So back to basics every single day with Claude and ChatGPT, Gemini, starting new features every morning. Julian: Yeah, it is just dizzying, isn't it? Audrey Ellis: It sure is. Julian: So your organization recently released a national study examining AI implementation across colleges and universities. Would love to hear about the study and some of the biggest challenges that higher ed is facing. Audrey Ellis: Yeah, we conducted a national study called AI for Institutional Transformation. We were really generously funded by the Gates Foundation and we worked with Complete College America to conduct interviews with senior leaders at over 30 institutions across the country from that segment that I just described. Our goal was really to understand how institutional leaders are kind of navigating a dual path. So we have institutions both trying to figure out today, tomorrow, this semester, next semester, what does AI mean for us? But we also are trying to understand, you know, dream big, wave a magic wand, what does AI mean in three years or five years? With the exponential rate of change and that comes with opportunity, and so we wanted to understand kind of both sides of that conversation: policy, governance, practical changes, but then also really big picture what could AI mean for how we do work in higher ed. And so all of this work was considered public goods funded in their investment strategy at Gates. So that's really exciting because it means that everything that we have published is available to the field for free. So I appreciate you having us on. I just really want to make sure that institutions know that this body of research and all of the tools that we've developed are available and can be downloaded, repurposed, edited, modified today. So we'll be sure to share the link and hopefully you can share that out with the listeners, but really excited to kind of get into what we learned. Kaitlin: Yes, so please tell us a bit about, you know, what do you see as some of the biggest—I guess you could start at either end of the spectrum—what are some of the biggest challenges or the biggest opportunities? Why don't you take us where you'd like to go first and then we can discuss the whole spectrum. Audrey Ellis: Sure. Let's start with the challenges. I think I'm a practical person and there's no doubt there's a lot of opportunity, but I think in order to be around to play with the opportunity, we have to figure out right now. So let's start there. We need to kind of, I think, what we've heard and what we've seen from the institutions that we've interviewed and studied is that very few institutions are taking a coordinated strategic approach to their AI adoption right now. So what that means is that kind of as you described in the intro, there are a tremendous amount of pilots and experimentation happening at institutions. And I feel pretty confident saying that probably every institution has at least a little bit of AI experimentation. I don't think that any institution could say they have no AI happening on campus anymore. But what that looks like at most institutions is a very decentralized, dispersed, kind of scattershot approach to AI adoption and AI innovation. Which isn't bad. So I'm not trying to suggest that institutions have made the wrong move so far, but that's come out of kind of a couple of steps that leaders have made that has led them to take this more decentralized approach. So we developed a rubric that helps institutional leaders think about kind of all the different decision areas or dimensions of AI adoption, everything from budget investments to mission alignment. All of those play a part. And when we saw our institutions that are kind of the most far ahead with their institutional transformation, they had addressed all of the different areas, whereas we saw that institutions, and really like around 80 percent of the institutions that we interviewed, are more in this scattershot area of implementation. And that's often happened because there's been a real focus on things like policy and academic integrity, which is certainly an important thing to consider, and I don't want to diminish the value of the conversation around academic integrity. But often it's led to kind of kicking the can down the road on any other decision making around AI. Like, we're going to stand up a committee or a task force and until they have the policy, we're doing AI, that box is checked, and we'll get there later. And what that's leading to is a growing divide between institutions who are taking this more strategic centralized approach around AI adoption where they're thinking, you know, what are the biggest strategic plays that I can make right now? Whether it's workflow efficiency or improving the student experience or kind of like winning back time that, you know, from an initiative fatigue standpoint, like our stakeholders on campus have been, you know, saying that they've been wearing multiple hats for decades with all of the reform and work that we do. So there's a lot of strategic opportunity here. But importantly, the divide is happening not only between decentralized and centralized or strategic adoption, but that is happening across kind of the resource lines of institutions. So those institutions that are more well resourced, which we used endowments as a proxy for resourced, those institutions that have those massive endowments are taking a centralized strategic approach and that gap is going to further widen if institutions don't figure out how to wrap their arms fully around their institutional strategy. A couple of other kind of big findings we saw is that, you know, staff are really not being considered in the training equation. You know, in higher ed, and I'm sure from your workforces angle this resonates, like we call ourselves the connector to the workforce, like we that is a huge part of our mission. But our institutions are also part of the workforce. Like, we employ so many people in our region. And we've actually often overlooked a really significant part of our own workforce in this moment when it comes to talking about AI skills and AI literacy. So we found that almost none of the institutions that we interviewed had intentional training for their staff. They were, you know, leveraging teaching and learning centers, professional development for faculty, but because there's often not a comparable center for staff, those folks were getting pretty overlooked in the training conversation. And that's just an example of the fact that AI is in a way just an accelerator of the existing inefficiencies and process challenges that we have at our institutions. And it's shining a new light on challenges that are not new. Whether that is, you know, trying to put dirty data into AI that has been dirty and causing inefficiencies or challenges with reporting for decades, but now AI is making you realize the data quality issue that you have, or whether it's that you don't have, you know, kind of standalone institutionalized professional development for your staff. There's just a number of existing challenges that AI is really illuminating right now. I'll end it here with, like, the big risk is that our institutions are feeling the pressure of having to keep up. Like, they're not ignorant of this widening gap. And that puts them in a bit of a vulnerable position when it comes to their relationships with vendors who often bring really important expertise and solutions to campus. But without having kind of senior leaders' arms wrapped around their strategy, it lends itself to a more impulsive vendor strategy that might not be thinking about the comprehensive picture that an institution needs to consider before they get into a long term contract. Julian: So it really is sort of, it sounds almost like it's really surfacing just what we already know to be these huge issues and inequities and so on. So, what do you see as some of the bigger areas of opportunity? And I guess and I'm particularly interested—I'm interested in all the institutions—but particularly interested in the institutions that are more challenged. You know, we do a lot of work, for example, with community colleges and, you know, they just don't have the resources and and and probably and are never going to. What are the opportunities for all institutions? Audrey Ellis: First let me just say that I don't mean to sound like doom and gloom. I realize I just ran through so many challenges only to just kind of paint the picture of the importance of taking a strategic approach. So I think in order to take advantage of the opportunities that AI can present, which I'll talk about in one second, I just want to make a plug for the resources that we've developed that are all public goods. So everything from toolkits, talking guides, facilitation resources, how to develop staff training around AI. All of those challenges I described have free resources to try to help institutional leaders wrap their arms around this. But I think that the opportunity is huge, right? Like, I having studied initiative fatigue for a long time can't tell you how many times I've heard faculty, staff, senior leaders say, "I would love to do more of this best practice you're teaching me about right now," whatever it be, like let's just take a faculty professional development about universal design in the syllabus or about memorizing your students' first names so that they feel a greater sense of belonging. And then faculty say, "Yes, like you've sold me. This is a good practice. But exactly when am I supposed to fit this into my schedule? Like I have already am, you know, working late or traveling between campuses because I'm an adjunct or because I have to work multiple roles because I do work at an institution that's, you know, lower resourced and maybe doesn't pay as much." So I think there's a real opportunity to offload some of the transactional work to make more time for the human. Which is definitely like a different narrative than what you would get from, you know, maybe like the most recent Mission Impossible movies where it's like AI takeover, global domination, we're all going to be irrelevant in a few years. Which don't get me wrong, I'm not an AI evangelist and I'm not here to say like that AI is going to be the perfect solution and there's a lot of challenges that it brings outside of what we're discussing today. But I do think that, like, we have an opportunity to do more of the mission-driven human work that I at least when I worked on campus wanted to do more of. Like, I didn't, I know that the advisors that I used to work with would have rather spent more time talking to students than dragging and dropping courses in Banner or Degree Works. They would have rather had that time to say like, "Hey, you know, Julian, what do you want to be when you grow up? Why did you come to this college? What made that a decision for you?" But they were often faced with the reality of a long line of students out their door waiting for them and that student who needed to register, and so it became more transactional like, "Okay, let me just get make sure you get into these courses." The challenge is really significant though with that, like, we know that students often pick let's say the wrong major on their application. If we're rushing the conversation then around what classes they should get into and don't help them course correct, they might end up having excess credits in their first semester or not seeing a connection to the college and not being retained. Not to mention from a staff sense of belonging engagement standpoint, it starts to feel really repetitive and not like what you've signed up for. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there. That one gets me really excited. Kaitlin: It is really tricky, right, to think about the layers here around, like, you mentioned earlier the vendor relationships. And the fact that each of these vendors, right, are also innovating and experimenting with AI and embedding AI in their own tools, and then what does it look like to start to think about how to holistically integrate tech systems that are also kind of changing and evolving in this landscape? And as, right, as you started today's conversation and saying using that word ubiquitous, right? Like it's everywhere. So what does it look like to be kind of in the center of this changing landscape trying to utilize these tools effectively, but the tools are changing? Right, and I appreciate what you just said about almost like well what can we start with? Where can we, like, where can we focus our energy on the things that matter most like engaging with students effectively? And can we draw, like, lessons learned from there or can we can we draw, like, places to start from the core of what matters most around students and engagement? Audrey Ellis: Yeah, I think you're really getting at at the real crux though, which is like if we don't decide what we want to use AI for, vendors will decide what we use AI for. Because every vendor is adding AI. That is how they will stay relevant in this moment. If you already have technologies, which you undoubtedly do, we all use technology in our day to day. And you don't take an active stance in this conversation and in your procurement and in your strategy, you will ultimately become a passive consumer of how vendors have decided you should use AI. And so I think that that is why it is so important right now to pause and think about what do you value about your job? What value do you provide that technology cannot, which is substantial in my opinion. Like, humans should absolutely still be at the fore of education and the driver. So then, then where are the biggest opportunities to leverage AI? And that's something that institutions who are taking a scattershot approach are not benefiting. Like, that exercise is not benefiting those institutions. And what we found is when we conducted our interviews, we had this heat map, I guess, that we asked institutions to vote for both where they have seen AI, where they are using AI, like from an org chart standpoint, but then also where they thought AI could have a lot of value and there was a there was a gap. Because I just talked about advising. Because it is a very obvious example of a place where AI could have a huge impact. And also, for what it's worth, advising is always the front line of every reform. So, you know, for better or for worse for the advisors from an initiative fatigue standpoint. But we also heard from a vast majority of our interviewees that strategic finance and financial aid are other areas where there's a lot of opportunity for AI, but almost no one is leveraging it. And so if we don't kind of demand or force the experimentation and the innovation in those areas, then we won't benefit from from it or someday, you know, the tools that we use to do our our financial aid packaging, for example, will roll out whatever they think is best for AI integration. And so I think there's a real opportunity to also work with vendors right now rather than just be kind of passive consumers of the AI washing, like whatever they're just embedding in their functionality. Julian: So my last job working for other people was as an administrator at a leader at a community college system. So my mind takes me to, okay, so what is working? What are examples of how this can be organized? Because, you know, you can be strategic even if you don't have a lot of money. And you can experiment and be thoughtful about how you pilot and grow and scale and and and drive change and policy and work with vendors. So are there in your research, in your travels, are there examples, structures that are working? You know, obviously the president needs to be the leader of leaders, but who typically is driving this work? And especially if you if institutions are thinking about it as both what we do on the learning educational teaching side and throughout the rest of the institution crossing to the admin and everything in in between? So I don't know, it's a lot to cover, but I'm curious to know if there are examples that stand out to you? Audrey Ellis: Well, ironically, there isn't like a monolithic AI lead in higher ed. That made our research really hard to be honest, because you're kind of like shooting fish in a barrel with an org chart. Like, I'm going to reach out to this person who I think maybe is in charge of AI and then they say, "No, I don't have anything to do with AI, talk to this person," it gets kind of kicked around. The alternative institutions are starting to assign or hire for like AI innovation leads, but I am kind of not fully in on that model. I don't think that it's I think a lot has yet to shake out in how that like AI or Chief AI Officer kind of role works. I think the risk just quickly is that it becomes kind of like "Oh, that is just that person's job and therefore it is no one else's." But with such a ubiquitous technology, it is everyone's job. And so what I usually say is we all need to be leaders in this moment and every supervisor should be thinking about what AI means for them and their direct reports. And that's why, you know, doing capacity building exercises like leveraging there are so many free AI training modules and content out there. Encouraging your leadership leadership broadly, being really like I said supervisors, to think about how AI could look in their unit is a really big opportunity and pretty low cost. I think that one very free next step that institutions can do is assess what their AI adoption currently looks like on their campus. So we developed a survey suite and I just recorded a long webinar about this, so feel free to put that in the show notes, but we developed a four part survey suite that includes a presidential reflection, leadership or department unit lead survey, an individual user survey, and a student survey. And the idea is that if you conduct all these surveys and I'll just interrupt myself to say I used to run institutional research office. So I'm not trying to blindly push surveys. I know that survey fatigue is very real. But AI is being used in offices that we don't know about in ways that are potentially very innovative or potentially very problematic. They may or may not be benefiting us as an institution and we don't know. So it's really important for senior leaders to get that kind of heat map view of what their institution looks like or their system. So Julian, I would say that is like the immediate next step. You can start with the rubric though. What I suggest is like take the rubric to your cabinet. Have everyone independently score your institution and then compare your scores. What does your VP of Academics think compared to your CFO and your CIO and how are you aligned? But then getting that more distributed look is just as important because, you know, I hear all the time about like, you know, the student workers who are also students and using AI in their work for school and then, you know, they already have the account set up and so they just start using this their current account to maybe do what their job is in their student worker role a little more clearly. It goes all the way down to, you know, frontline staff that could be using AI but also could be really creatively using AI and perhaps and I'm not saying do this in an audit or punitive way. So I think in addition to the survey, the most important secondary action leaders can take is getting really tight on like what is actually out of bounds from an AI use standpoint and then otherwise encouraging experimentation. So, you know, the institutions that are, you know, private, really well resourced, I've been kind of watching this moment unfold for the last three years. And I remember, you know, in the first six months of ChatGPT on the scene, there were senior leaders who full on banned AI and then there were others who said, "This is your kind of temporary notice. Do not upload FERPA protected data. Do not put, you know, confidential information into AI. Otherwise, experiment and tell us what's working." And that I think is another free action that's actually setting institutions apart right now as far as how far they've gotten. A lot of institutions that I've worked with have spent a lot of time making AI policies that by the time they get approved by the board are not relevant. And so, you know, I would encourage leaders to not overplay the policy angle and and think about how you might incorporate one or two potential additional lines in existing policies. Like AI isn't new. If you've used GPS for the last 10 years, like our technologies include AI already. So in theory our policies should for the most part cover the ways that AI rolls out. And let's not use it as kind of like a delay tactic anymore. Kaitlin: There is an element of this ongoing learning that I think it would be more comfortable if we could say, "Well, when I'm an expert in this, then I'll use it," or "When I understand it enough, then I'll apply it here." And there's this reality that that's not what we're facing and so, you know, I think it really is complicated, right, how to get comfortable with that as you're saying from just like a human development and capacity standpoint. Like how do we all like gain some comfort with that because the world keeps moving and our jobs keep, you know, every day we wake up into our jobs and so what does it look like to apply this ongoing learning mindset to something that I think it can feel a little uncomfortable on an individual level never mind an organizational level. Audrey Ellis: Yeah, actually from my initiative fatigue research, that is a really important takeaway is that below all of these institutional decisions or maybe like a history of failed initiatives or poor communication or mismanaged expectations, there's the human element where your stakeholders on campus are honestly just like "How does this affect me in my day to day and will I still have a job?" And it doesn't help that with AI that is also the narrative in our society and, you know, like there's a lot of fear mongering. And so that's why I say that every supervisor has a role right now because especially in the absence of a presidential statement around AI, every employee is going to look to their boss for signals around "Should I be worried right now? Should I take a growth mindset or a fixed mindset in this moment?" And that is not something to underestimate. Like if you have a growth mindset, you're seeing that you bring I think intrinsic value because of who you are and your your humanness and your mission drivenness. And then you are saying "How can I continue to do this better with this new technology?" If you have a fixed mindset, you're saying "As I am today is protected and so I cannot change or else what I am right now is as under threat, I guess." And I think that is very much like being rinsed and repeated in the public sector right now and so I think leaders need to lead by example. They need to say, "I am scared of AI too. I am trying to learn and you should learn; we will learn together. We will learn with our students and maybe from our students," rather than just being silent because I think that's when the real fear happens and then folks kind of freeze. Julian: It's so interesting because it does on one level harken to so much of what, you know, those of us who've been trying to reform education have been dealing with for years, which is career pathways, yeah, that happens down there, or workforce development, yeah, there's an office I think they're in that other building. And this idea of how do you just integrate this work in your everyday? And it's really scary when something this powerful has emerged. We have not experienced anything like this. And and I'm almost interested in as we wind down the conversation, you know, we want to hear from you again and more about how listeners can follow and continue to learn more and follow your work. I also like there's a part of me that like wants to talk to you again in six months, talk to you again three months later, talk to you again three months later because I think it could be a very different conversation, you know, that's just the reality we're in. Audrey Ellis: Yeah, and I know I would love to keep the conversation going. It certainly is only ramping up and is not slowing down. So on our website, t3advisory.com, there's an section or a tab that's called AI for Institutional Transformation. All of our resources are available to download and use on that page. That also includes our recorded webinars and upcoming webinars. I'll be presenting at a bunch of conferences this year and really happy to hear from folks if they want to continue the conversation. We hope to do a second round of this study, like you were just saying, Julian, like this conversation is not going away. You know, luckily the way I talk about it is constantly updating and being informed, but our actual data was collected last year. So I really hope that we'll be able to collect even more data formally officially in the coming months as a continuation of this research. And, you know, we work with a lot of institutions and systems on their AI adoption strategy, and we are also thinking about developing some solutions to support institutions with this in a more scalable way, so maybe we can check back in in a couple months. Kaitlin: That sounds great. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to connect with us today, Audrey, and to share this work and yeah, looking forward to remaining in touch. Audrey Ellis: Yeah, thank you so much for having me and really excited to be part of the conversation. Julian: Thank you. Kaitlin: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about Work Forces Consulting, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.

Dr. Joy Coates On Designing Systems for Economic Mobility

Dr. Joy Coates, Managing Director of Post-Secondary Opportunity at Third Sector, discusses how to build systems that prioritize real-world results, such as higher wages and better careers, for all learners. Drawing on a 20-year career spanning business and government, she explains how to move beyond good intentions to actually change how public programs and budgets are used to support people navigating life transitions, including those returning home after incarceration or managing mental health challenges. The conversation explores how to make sure a worker's certifications and skills count wherever they go, putting more power into the hands of the individual rather than the institution. Dr. Joy discusses the Nexus Method, a practical approach she co-authored with Nick Beadle, that leverages the regulatory concept of "advanced standing" to bridge the gap between skills-first hiring and traditional registered apprenticeships. Using examples from states like Alabama and Massachusetts, she highlights how businesses in industries like manufacturing can find and keep talent by making small, strategic changes to their hiring rules, such as removing unnecessary degree requirements. Finally, she outlines the vital role of local community colleges in connecting people in the community to the careers of the future. Transcript Julian: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Julian: Kaitlin, one of the recurring themes on this podcast lately has been the need for a credential system that is transparent and easy to navigate—one where the skills you earn in one place actually count in another. And we've talked quite a lot about this recently with folks like Scott Cheney from Credential Engine and Amber Garrison Duncan from C-BEN. Kaitlin: We have. And today we're exploring additional strategies for moving from establishing the technical foundation to make these credentials portable to engaging different organizations and funding sources to build a credential landscape that puts these ideas into action for all learners. Julian: Exactly. And our guest today has spent her career making sure these systems actually work for everyone. Dr. Joy Coates is the Managing Director of Post-Secondary Opportunity at Third Sector. She specializes in taking different parts of our world—like schools, state agencies, colleges, employers—and helping them change how they use their resources so they can focus on what really matters: helping adult learners get into better careers. Kaitlin: Dr. Joy brings over 20 years of experience to this work, including senior roles at the Markle Foundation and the Tennessee Department of Education. She is also behind a new approach called the Nexus Method, which is really a practical way to bridge the gap between hiring based on skills and traditional apprenticeships. Julian: Welcome to Work Forces, Dr. Joy, and we're thrilled to have you with us today. Dr. Joy Coates: Good morning! I'm so excited to be here with you both. Julian: Well, we've given a little bit of your background, but we'd love to hear you tell us about your background and the journey that led you to your work at Third Sector. Dr. Joy Coates: What's wonderful about the experiences that I'm now having at Third Sector is it really was an opportunity—a culmination, if you will—of everything I've worked on for the past 20 years. Everything I've been fortunate enough to be in the room with as these key decisions are made in terms of education, economic development. So, a lot of my earlier work, when I was still in corporate even, I spent some time in investor relations for a real estate organization that was focused on what we were calling back then "triple bottom line," which meant the return on investor, green development, and then also the return for the community. As part of that work, I was over corporate social responsibility. So I was working with all these organizations around their compliance to make sure that women, vendors of color, and others who were underrepresented were actually getting these really lucrative development contracts in Boston. And that experience shaped me so much. And different board appointments I had as a result of that really helped me shift completely my focus into the nonprofit sector and really try to path in terms of constantly coming back to outcomes, constantly coming back to what outcomes and equity mean together. And so at Third Sector, we're always thinking about that. We're thinking about how everyone who has a seat in the ecosystem can not only be brought to the table, but roll that expertise up to the government so the government can make better decisions for their constituents and so that we can really see lasting systemic change in these critical areas. Kaitlin: I feel like that's a great segue. Could you tell us a little bit more about Third Sector and the work that you're doing currently? Dr. Joy Coates: So, I am the Managing Director of Post-Secondary Opportunity. Third Sector also has several other practice areas; we also have a practice area that focuses more deeply on workforce pathways on the policy side, things like WIOA and TANF and better using these dollars that already exist and having them repurposed to serve more people. We also have a behavioral health division, we have a diversion and re-entry division that supports folks coming back into the workplace and just really back into the general population after periods of incarceration or homelessness. And then we have an early childhood education practice area. And so I'm fortunate enough to be able to be in spaces with these folks and think through where all these critical intersections are. If you were thinking almost like wheels on a spoke, it's where are all the different pain points in the pipeline of a person's existence, a person who's moving in that cradle-to-career pathway, and then all the different stop outs. Where are places where people get off track? Are they getting off track because of a mental health issue, an incarceration issue, because education quality wasn't where it was supposed to be? And so at Third Sector, where we have this focus on outcomes-focused government and outcomes-focused contracting, it's more of—we know and believe that folk want to do the right thing, especially in these different government agencies that are already so taxed. And what we like to do is plug in and help them get from intention to practice so that these things actually happen in the way that they hope and envision. Julian: So, with that focus on outcomes and building more equitable workforce systems, talk to us a little bit about the connection then between credential quality and portability. How do you build an ecosystem where credentials aren't just high quality, but where they can really be carried across different systems? Dr. Joy Coates: So, certainly the portability question isn't necessarily new. In fact, it applies to folk, adult learners like myself—career adult learners who had a family and were working with different institutions of education depending on my schedule, my availability, and transparently what I could afford, right, in terms of different degree programs. And so when we think about the credential quality, what that really means is: what's the bearing this credential has on my future? What is the dollars and cents bearing? If I get this credential, realistically, how much more do I stand to make so that I can take better care of my family? And the folk who help make that decision, one, are the institutions of higher ed and the training providers that design them, but also the employers who really control the receptivity of these credentials in the field. And so when we speak about portability, we're really talking about how that information moves. From the learner who's actually putting in the work to get the credential, to the training provider, and then to the employer, and of course in some cases CBOs who may be providing things like career coaching, things of that nature. How is this information flowing across all these stakeholders that will ultimately have some impact on someone's economic future? But what's important about the portability is we are looking specifically at ways to put the power of that portability into the hands of the learner, rather than them being at the mercy of multiple different standards of transferability. And we know that's a tall order, we understand, but we know we're also not the only ones in this work. And so we heard you mention Amber Garrison Duncan a moment ago from C-BEN, who is a fantastic partner of ours and we really love the work that they're doing. While we have our own ideas—and we'll get into that, the recent paper we released in a few minutes—we also are really about amplification in terms of impact. We want to have the right partners and really do our homework to understand, hey, there are things that are out there that are working, but maybe we've got some leverage points in government or with other partners that other folk may not have in the field and vice versa. So how much more could we do together if we lined up on all those things that we all bring to the respective table? Kaitlin: So, you recently co-authored a white paper—which may be the paper you just mentioned—on the Nexus Method. And so for our listeners, could you please explain that paper, the framework that you outlined, and specifically how using the concept of advanced standing can bridge the gap between skills-first hiring and registered apprenticeship? Dr. Joy Coates: So, again, not new concepts, but concepts we're really excited to dig in on. So, first of all, it'd be remiss if I did not mention our co-author on that piece, which is—who is Nick Beadle, who some of your listeners may know of or you may know of certainly. And certainly after being in federal government for a number of years and being a journalist and things of that nature, Nick and I crossed paths several times at Markle, where we were really thinking—he was running Good Jobs and I was thinking about skills-first hiring and scaling that and all the partners who needed to be at the table. And so for this paper, one of the things we're thinking about at Third Sector and that Nick has also been thinking about is: what does the next iteration of apprenticeships look like? As we think about things like different forms of financial aid is either going away entirely or being collapsed, and pathways being a bit more overwhelming for folk. Again, to my earlier point: what are the things we already have that work well? So when we talk about the Nexus Method, we're really talking about policies and regulations that are already in place, like advanced standing and other things of that nature. Already, if we use them properly, they enable us to accelerate someone's career pathway in an existing framework. So if we're talking about a registered apprenticeship and the skills-first hiring practice of thinking about what experiences is this person coming in the door with that really ought to truncate that apprenticeship length in some way, right, just like you would do with credit for prior learning? So the advanced standing on apprenticeships, up until very recently—as recently as about a week and a half ago—had a cap. There was only so much advanced standing you could get. Now that cap has been lifted. So when we zoom back into what we're saying in the report is, if we take the best of skills-first hiring and the best of apprenticeship, we now have a more holistic way to customize how folk are able to advance their careers with these critical tools. And then the skills-first hiring practices—we call them practices because it's not just about recruitment and hiring. It's also about retention and how you set up within your organization your own structure for how somebody is able to move within your organization and ascend based on what they've already brought in the door, your ability to codify those skills against what your organization needs, and then your ability to kind of evolve, let their skills evolve in an organic yet targeted way throughout the life of the organization. So there's a way for you to codify those practices. And so when we were documenting this in the paper and pulling in language that we've heard from employers, including transparently some of their pushback on these pieces, it's employers and other stakeholders—but certainly we're talking about employers right now—employers want to do the right thing. Employers want talent. Employers want to have fair and equitable hiring practices that build a strong pipeline. The pushback comes from the noise in the field and the confusion over which strategies are the strategies and kind of being a little bit nervous about: I don't want to pilot this, it doesn't work, now it's affiliated with me. So what we're doing is taking existing research, one, for that grounding, existing policy so folk know that they don't have to recreate something, and then laying out an actual roadmap for how that works. So in follow up to the paper, we'll be developing some guides on how employers can actually do this in practice. And also we'll both be at various conferences, ASU-GSV and things of that nature, where you'll be able to at least come by and say hi, or if we're presenting—we're not presenting at ASU, we'll just both be there. But at the places where we are presenting, we certainly hope that folk will come and just talk to us because we, you know, we want to share this information. We don't want to make it seem like, oh, you have to have this special criteria to do it. The criteria is really desire to open up your pipeline and make that pipeline viable. And so we're trying to offer something clear and cohesive that anybody can use, but also understand that you do need some guidance and you do need some practical support on how to make that work regardless of your industry. Julian: So where is it working? You say a lot of what you do is about amplification, and it's—you've talked about the institutional level, you've talked a little bit about policy and with respect to the specific method you've written about with Nick Beadle, wondering too: is anyone doing this effectively? Dr. Joy Coates: In terms of the Nexus Method itself, it's a bit of a pilot; that's why we introduced the paper, we're inviting people to embark on this. Of course! But when we talk about apprenticeships, certainly, and you'll see like these pieces are working in places. So you see apprenticeships working very well in Massachusetts, Colorado, California; starting to see some of that evolution in Mississippi and Alabama. What we want to do is work with the states who have existing apprenticeship practices and existing employer flexibility around the skills-first hiring piece and begin to build cohorts where we can document the specific implementation of the intersection of these two practices. To our knowledge—I'm sure someone is doing it, but they're not calling it that, right? So we want to elevate, if they are doing it, call us, we want to talk to you. But if they're not doing it, we want to help them see that it actually wouldn't be as overwhelming as they think to do it. And so that's the excitement and energy that we're in right now: okay, we have something here. And we've had employers give us feedback directly on LinkedIn, commenting on our posts of "this is exactly the tension that we are wrestling with right now," especially in things like manufacturing and automotive. And so we know we can't do everything at once, so we would likely start in one of those two industries and begin to build and rapidly disseminate that evidence base so that others can adopt. Kaitlin: Building actually on that—what you're hearing from people, from employers around the articulation of the challenge and the need—what does it take to get that deep employer buy-in? Because as you said, right, it can be hard to commit to say like, let's try this pilot or let's try this newer approach. But what have you seen work in that respect, you know, where have you seen success in deep buy-in? Dr. Joy Coates: I think what works the best is doing your homework in advance to understand the industry. So for example, citing, you know, the Markle example when we were doing Rework America Alliance: we built these skills-first hiring kits with input that have subsequently been, you know, absorbed into JFF's portfolio on the skills space. Starting with the employer first to understand where their pain points are, trying to take as much of the burden off of the employer as you can from your space as a practitioner, but yet never losing sight of the fact that the employer is the one who actually has to do it, right? So you can do things like, you know, create a kit or download those hiring kits and use that with your employer that you're consulting with. You can actually host, you know, accelerator events, which Markle and JFF have done. Goodwill Easterseals in Minnesota has a large—I guess now the fourth year that they've been running these accelerators for employers. And what they do is they basically have engaged employers who are willing to give some of their time—not more than three hours, because we're talking about sometimes director, exec, and above level of folk who are coming—getting these folk in a room with other employers in a space that feels relevant yet non-hyper-competitive so they can talk about these real-world problems, know they're not the only one, know they're not being vilified, and then walk them through the steps it will take while also bringing in case studies of other employers who have done it. So it's building the trust, building the credibility, and at the same time being clear about the ease of replicability is really what the things that we see that work the best and that have had the most staying power in the coming up on a decade or so now since we've been engaging with employers in this work. Julian: So what is sort of the biggest "aha" moment for employers when they kind of see that this is working? Dr. Joy Coates: What I have seen as one of the biggest ahas is it actually doesn't take as long as they think it will is the first piece. And the other piece is they don't have to redo every single HR practice that they have; they just need to tweak the ones that they have to make them a little bit more flexible, right? So when you think about something like removing a degree requirement—certainly that's not applicable for every job; some jobs have degree requirements, like doctors, nurses, things of that nature because of the technical training that you need. But when we talk about hiring, promoting, and expanding roles and opportunities based on merit, everybody has that kind of baked into the way they do business just transparently. It's good business, you want to keep your people. So what I think that we see the light bulb go off with employers is when they realize, okay, I'm not doing everything wrong, but there are one or two places where I could potentially see exponential increase in retention and productivity if I made and committed to these specific changes. And we see relief. We don't see, you know, we don't see this regret of, oh my gosh, why didn't I do it 20 years ago, because people are really very much in the now. Everybody's under pressure with the current economy and things of that nature. We really don't have time to lament what could have been. You know, the thing that's the most active and most salient is folk realizing, okay, there is a blueprint, I don't have to start from scratch, I don't have to nix all my HR practices, and I actually do have the folk in place that can help me bring this thing to the next level without it sucking all my time as CEO, executive director, whatever the case may be. Kaitlin: I feel like that is one thing we've heard from so many guests, Julian, guests coming from very different perspectives in the—in the landscape of the future of work and learning, which is really like: start small, right, like don't try to take on everything at once. And I think especially as you alluded to, Dr. Joy, the—this really rapidly emerging, evolving, and changing landscape—it's like, where I think people want to know: where can I start because it can be really challenging to know like, how can I dive into this without, you know, even at moments of ambiguity and uncertainty? Julian: Yeah, I think that notion of starting small and iterating and, you know, it's a complicated landscape now but I still think that's kind of been a missing element. So often, especially with grants—and you know, I mentioned Markle, you know, with grants and publicly funded programs—where some a good idea, often a great idea, is put forward but it doesn't take root and it isn't baked in in a way that's going to allow it to kind of incubate and you can iterate and grow and really make it part of what you do. Dr. Joy Coates: Yes. I think the other piece too and what I think is a bit of a victory for the space is you're seeing the federal government, especially around apprenticeship, start—start contributing more heavily to pass-through funding that is meant to benefit and offset costs to employers in a way that you didn't see before. And I think that, you know, funding always kind of goes a long way you think about that more from the nonprofit standpoint. But even though we're not telling you to tear down your whole organization as the employer, we recognize there is impact, right? There's always some cost to making any kind of change, positive or negative in your organization. And so I do think it was a smart, bipartisan, potentially sustainable thing for the government to do to say, okay, we're going to release some—release some grants, we're going to have trusted intermediaries apply, but the folk who actually need to make the change stick, that's where we're going to push the lion's share of that funding. Now, certainly if you're a consultant, you might wish the funding was going a different way. But for the sake of the growth of the field, to see a significant and substantial investment in the employer and the way that they are taking up and changing practices, I think is—is an important shift to see. Kaitlin: So, as we begin to wind down this conversation, and you've already started to go there, but I'll ask the question explicitly: what are some practical steps that you can offer our listeners—whether they are employers, or educators, or workforce leaders—to help them better prepare for this changing credential landscape and their roles within it? Dr. Joy Coates: I think—well, the first step is always a bit of a mind shift as we talk about at Third Sector: are you open to this degree of change? And it doesn't necessarily mean: gosh, I'm underwater, everything's on fire, I'll try everything—I'll try any and everything, right? We don't mean that when we mean—I have heard that this targeted thing you are doing works and I want to know what the tangible steps are. So certainly, as with any thought leader in the field: our website, we have both the Nexus Method and the—The Future is Portable, which is more specifically around micro-credentials. So go to our website, www.thirdsectorcap.org, pull those resources down, reach out to folk. My contact info is in there, or if you have another trusted partner that is doing this work—we know we're not the only partner in this work—I think the first tangible step: make a decision. The second one: get the right partner to help you implement. And then the third one: have a strong sense of mutual accountability between yourself and actually the field of the change that you want to make. If you're in manufacturing and you know that there is, you know, a 28,000-some-odd gap in a particular role and you want to be at the forefront of closing that gap, then that's what you dig in on. You hone in on: this is the gap that I'm trying to fill. I've got, you know, a colleague at General Motors and she is focused on the recruiting of frontline employees. And when she and I speak, she says: I can take this framework and apply it directly to how I am recruiting these frontline manufacturing specialists at General Motors and then I can say, you know, these are something clear that I can do. Now, again, this is a colleague who has just read the paper and thinks it's great, it's not Ford signing off on us, that's not what I'm saying. But, you know, specific, tangible examples: what problem are you trying to solve, what partner do you need, and what's your real timeline? What are you really willing to commit to in terms of implementation? It won't happen overnight, but it won't happen at all if you don't have a more specific goal, right? And sometimes a partner like us at Third Sector could be the one to even help you set up the timeline. But I'd be willing to bet that many employers have their own timeline they're working against; the gap is they don't know how to get there. Julian: No, I think that's so true and they—so much of this ebbs and flows with economies and, you know, we're doing a bunch of work now in manufacturing with employers that are struggling to find—many that are struggling to find entry-level workers still. So, we know there's a lot happening and changing in healthcare and, you know, so there's it really is more about applying the methodology and working with the employers who have the need. Dr. Joy Coates: And I would if I can add a fourth, if we're not out of time. I would also say don't underestimate the power of your local IHEs, particularly if you're in a community like Boston or San Diego, San Francisco that has really strong community college networks that are providing not only a lot of this training, but a lot of like wrap-around services and helping folk get ready in some of the softer skills areas of this work. Because these are folk who can work as an intermediary for you in terms of understanding and identifying where that pipeline is. A lot of employers are not in the community, and this is not an indictment of those folk, but if you're not in the community and if you even feel like you can't be in the communities where your pipeline is, you need a partner that's rooted in that community and can help you not only get to those folk, but work with you to make sure the map between what they are learning and what you need them to know actually are integrated. Kaitlin: Absolutely. Well, this has been such an insightful—and practical—conversation. We really appreciate you joining us. As we wind down, how can our listeners continue to follow you and learn more about your work? Dr. Joy Coates: We will be doing a couple of follow-up webinars. If you're not on our mailing list, go to our website, www.thirdsectorcap.org, get on our mailing list. My smiling face is on the website under Post-Secondary Opportunity; click on that and if you don't get me, somebody will connect you to me. We are pretty active on LinkedIn, and it's one of the—and I don't know if y'all are seeing it, but I'm seeing quite a—LinkedIn is really turning into more of a gathering place, I feel like, in the past year or two where we're all just kind of going: "Hmm, how do we manage today's delight?" And folk are really connecting with each other on there. So I am on LinkedIn literally all day—not all day because I have meetings or whatever—but I'm easily accessible there; send me a request, send me a message. We don't have to connect all the way and I can either help you myself or give you some resources. But everything that we do, we usually post to LinkedIn. I will post it, Third Sector will repost it, Nick will repost it. And so as this work kicks off even more in the coming months, you'll see things from he and I about what's going on. And also his newsletter, "Jobs at Work" newsletter, has a whole plethora of connected issues that he speaks on twice a week, and so we would recommend that you engage with that as well. Julian: It's funny when you mention LinkedIn as a gathering place; I initially had this vision of like: yeah, used to be kind of like a relatively quiet bar or restaurant, and now it's just like booming, it's like overwhelming. But yeah, that's great and you see your posts and Nick as well frequently. So for sure, we will continue to follow your work and look to gather with you and, to echo Kaitlin, thank you so so much for taking the time to join us. We've really enjoyed this. Dr. Joy Coates: My pleasure! Really was a delight. Thank you both so much for having me, and thank everybody who's listening. Kaitlin: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. 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