welcome for joining us uh welcome to this session uh on the career readiness excuse me sorry uh career readiness and american inaugural report we're so excited to have you with us uh particularly given whatever's happening out in the hallway that's clearly more exciting so you must be really excited about this report um we are uh so you know we will talk a little bit about the report itself uh that is anticipated to be published uh in the second week in may i believe but scott will give us some high-level findings from from what the report is saying um about 65 pages worth of data so we didn't need to bore you all with that today we'll pick out some some key factors and then have a great discussion about it um and uh so to start off i'll introduce myself and my colleagues i'm julie lammers senior vice president of government relations and advocacy for the nonprofit american student assistants we're a national nonprofit that focuses on college and career readiness issues starting with kids as early as middle school so really trying to help kids find their their purpose and their path at a much earlier age in order to make informed decisions about career so we are happy to partner with the coalition for career development center on this work and are excited to have represented from ibm ibm here to talk about the work great work that they are doing in this space um so to kick it off i'd like to introduce scott solberg scott is a professor in the department of counseling and applied human development at the bu wheelock college of education and human development that is a mouthful on that business card there scott and he works nationally and internationally on design implementation and evaluation of effective career development programs in addition scott is also the lead researcher for an organization called the co coalition for greer development center which is an organization out of dc that brings together industry partners and it is a non-nonpartisan industry-led organization trying to really implement policy and push policy around career readiness in the united states um so he can talk a little bit more about that um with us as well is lydia logan who is vice president of global education and workforce development at ibm where she leads ibm's education skills initiatives uh that are looking to create more inclusive and effective workforces around the world prior to ibm lydia was the executive director for verizon's innovative learning schools initiative at digital promise she's also served as managing director at chiefs for change senior director of policy at the broad foundation and vice president executive director of the institute for competitive workforce at the us chamber of commerce we're particularly excited to have lydia here today with that impressive uh resume given that she filled in last minute for us you may have noticed in your program that they we were expecting to have another guest who was stuck someplace in travel nightmare and so lydia jumped in today and very very nicely agreed to fill in but we are so excited excited to have you here for this work so uh let's start well with a little background on the on the work um and scott's gonna run through a few data points just just to level set some of this this is really uh an effort by this organization the coalition for career development center um they're try is trying to paint a picture of how well we're doing it preparing us uh how well the us is doing at preparing youth for uh for their careers and what you'll see from the report and it's important to note is they're not going to call out specific states for how poorly they may be doing or how well others may be doing this is really trying to set a benchmark of how the united states as a whole is doing to meet certain criteria and really trying to understand from the perspective of k-12 education systems workforce systems who's working together well where the data is looking promising where we need to push more to make improvements and really trying to give policy makers thought leaders business leaders and others an opportunity to say we need to lean in on these few areas in order to to improve policy so with that scott i'll turn it over to you to give some high-level info on the on the report all right well thank you everyone so glad you're here um first of all i just want to give a shout out to american student assistants i know their sponsor but what you don't know is on the back end they're doing this work and they're working directly with middle schools they're building up free materials so middle schools can get involved they're funding to help schools build their capacity this work so it's been phenomenal to have a partnership with them i'm glad they're in boston that's even more fun as well but they're working nationally on this topic so i want to thank you all for the work you do i'll come back and talk even more specifically about some of that during the piece so so right so this is about um our queer readiness center or the coalition career development center is all about how can we make career readiness the number one education priority now you're saying wait a minute what about education what about college what about all that it's all connected who knew that when youth have purpose and they have a sense of hope and they start pursuing the pathways towards that what do they look at what are the learning opportunities i need to invest in school becomes relevant so does out of school learning opportunities we just had a beautiful presentation earlier today on both the in and out of school learning opportunities we need our youth serving organizations we need our youtube platforms we had all these different opportunities that you can get to get the skills that they need but what we need to start this whole process is a youth who realizes these different potentials and possibilities and it starts with aspirations and we've got some great work in oecd showing that if we can build their capacity to aspire they have better economic outcomes as adults period and that's what we're talking about when you so there's going to be a lot of language i'm going to use that may be less familiar but this is the that's the drive it's all moving towards youth driven how do we support them in finding purpose and then how do we as adults build the caring supportive relationships as well as access to the learning opportunities to help them on their way so we um so i just said everything that was not on my notes which is exactly how it happens but of course i wanted to make sure we could get it all out we're also talking about through this and i'm not gonna we are talking about all means all so it's all used but we are specifically interested in supporting our bipoc youth youth with disabilities we have youth that are in foster care we have a whole range of what we call in in the research we do high need high opportunities i know we call opportunity at the ones that have stepped off we're talking about this whole population that if we invest right the economic and the life success and the well-being of those individuals is only going to go up and you know what's amazing is that work i was talking about capacity to aspire it has a stronger effect for those populations that that's what we're finding longitudinally is that we're having a payoff as adults when we do these kinds of investments so i'm really excited about that so how are we doing and you heard we're going to get a snapshot may 17th and 18th and you'll see at the end of this you can sign up but we want you there at the conference when we go through all this report and it is a big one oh my gosh i don't know how we're going to do that in an hour too but um i'm just going to give you a smidge right so personalized career and academic plans everyone's familiar i'm getting a lot of laughs back there all right so um so funny thing happened on the way to no child left behind they increased the standards for graduation got nervous so they started this thing called individualized graduation plans we call it personal graduation plans in texas they started giving that so parents could understand what was going on and in some states and i'm not going to call them out also did it so parents could opt out i don't want my child to have to learn more so it's okay right even though these were the new standards to get in and i'm not going to use the word college i'm going to talk about post-secondary because i want two and four-year to be on equal footing um so so what happened was once that started going they started realizing things were starting to happen that as the youth started looking at their future and started putting this together they started actually learning and they started selecting into a more rigorous academic schedule and i was fortunate to work with our u.s department of labor's office of disability employment policy to begin studying this to see what's happening what does it look like when it works so i'm not saying it's all working well but when it does work schools go from the bottom to the top on graduation rates kids all of a sudden in rural areas where they have no one doing anything all of a sudden they're going into those post-secondary pathways with hope and saying how much they feel sorry for the other towns that aren't feeling this way right we were seeing magic just incredible things happening and the states are buying it and what you're seeing now and we've been you know we've been part of the helping with these states we have a state leaders network on this we have 30 states that have really good policy language they've been able to come together across the states and see the same values the same hope and purpose of what this is about and it's really good on paper really good on paper right but there's a problem right how do we go from the paper to the resources the curriculum as i was saying esa pushing out the curriculum because that was a hole and they saw that how do we get schools to adopt fully right and see the value of engaging in this with quality how do we build their capacity to do it how do we get them access to technology how do we get them to the professional development these are the things that are not in place so we've got the starting point we've got the kind of we've drafted the model but we've got a lot of holes in what's going on so it's exciting and that's and you see it's got a little sunshine that's a bright spot okay there's a little there's a little rain um so i'm only going to the end of the story we have a lot more in the report that also talks about investments right how are we investing asa did a phenomenal analysis of work-based learning to see how states are on there we got some challenges we were also looking at ap courses and who's getting access to the kinds of early before they get to college kinds of things that they need what does that look like we've also got questions about equity who's getting access to the kinds of quads so there's all that in there but let's just get to the end of the story which is how are we doing on the outcome and these are just a few of the outcomes that we're looking at so post-secondary completion rates at the two-year level five states are getting 60 and above okay um let me see if that's right it might be 70. let me check i don't want to mess up on that nope um 60 now remember when we were in college right if you got a 60 on that exam what was your grade level so you can get a sense right so if if 60s are as our is our barrier to say oh who's doing above 60. all right so you can see we got some issues um the two-year completion rates are problem the other thing that's really interesting that showed on there is part-time student retention rates really problematic really problematic um seven states are getting 60 above for the fork you're post-secondary now the challenge we have with that data is that we don't want to talk about those who made it to the post-secondary we want to talk about the ninth graders who started their journey right and some states are doing this like in massachusetts they have a waterfall analysis on every school in the state and i can in five minutes should talk to a school and say let's look at your problem the problem is for every 100 9th graders only 15 latinx students are getting through the post-secondary pipeline that's a problem in the number one of the number one states in the country around education they compete with norway they compete with finland everyone wants to talk about finland i love my colleagues in finland they're great singapore right that's where they're competing against and they're only getting 15 out students with disabilities 15 are black students it's about 22 23 so that's where we need to hold ourselves accountable as a community right at the state level we need to be talking about this as a community issue not the school issue not the college issue so what colleges do is they say well i only want to be responsible for those who came in we as a society if we want to become a career-ready nation that's my new one i hope that works we want to become a career-ready nation we've really got to lean in from the ninth grade all the way up and we've got to bring business and industry in we've got to bring all these different kinds of supports you serving organizations and such and then finally the post-high school placement into post-secondary three states are doing pretty well and i think that's where i had the 70 mark um yeah that doesn't sound too great and then when you take a look at keeping oh and then this last one and then we'll i want to get more conversation the um the neat youth so we call them opportunity youth right so these are the youth that have fallen off our radar they're not on the grid we're not seeing them in education we're not seeing them in work so they're not earning wages they're not in training programs so internationally we call them neat youth not an employment education training i kind of like that but i also like opportunities fine um we're doing great when it comes to 16 to 19 year olds we're looking good most many of the states they're nailing it but at 20 the number of states who are keeping it below 10 2. that's that's that's really where our challenge is we have to be thinking about that data point scotland if you can imagine country now i know it's a country and i know it's tiny right so it's probably the size of some of our counties but it's beautiful place um i went and visited them to find out what are they doing what they're doing is the moment someone falls off that grid guess who's actually knocking at the door literally a career counselor they have it all set up every single one of those because they know that that's where their economic challenge is if they do not make sure that that group is connected they're losing economically and so that's where they've really invested in the career development process as do and they're doing the similar things we're talking about in in in scotland as well around that personalized current academic plan but anyway that's i should stop there because i talked way more than i probably asked well we'll get in more into more of the data as we go through this conversation but as you say the report overall shows somewhat of a bleak picture of where we are right this the the intention of the report is to set a standard uh understanding of of the current condition so that we can all dive in deeper on where their improvements can be made and then this shows there's lots of room for improvement right a lot we can only go up but but you've also you've studied this for a very long time scott you've been involved in a lot of the efforts to to make change where has progress been made the most over the last five to ten years well i think i do think that we're seeing the value of investing in this personalized career planning process and what it does is three focus on it and this is what's different than traditional career development how many of you took an interest assessment right that was your career development piece and did anyone come up as florist i think florist comes up for everybody right my daughter's friend came out as a mortician and they've been laughing at her for weeks right so they're not really helping you know they might help a couple of kids but they're not helping and plus they're long and boring i don't know but 880 questions i'm sorry so what we want is we want youth to discover their talent and yes where their talent is it's not in the classroom right minecraft kerbal space program is one of my big ones they should be paying me because i sell this all the time i must sell a bunch of them where they're learning physics and how to build rocket ships and all this geometry and stuff it's incredible and they're learning it as they go they're gaming a lot of them and in that gaming they're learning tremendous skills that they want and it's engineering skills yet they don't do all the math right so where we're seeing success is when we start with talent and then help them discover and it is a discovery process that this talent transfers across a wide range of occupational opportunities and when they see that they have potential and it's more than just the classroom they do start reflecting on what they can do better in the classroom right so where we're seeing success is where we're seeing schools starting that process to build that capacity then we need and this is another very important thing we have to look at for our students of color they don't have role models that say you belong in engineering and it's clear i even had one of my undergrads in class last week if i don't see myself there all i know is i don't belong so we have to start putting together role models caring and encouraging adults from the workforce that are going to be able to engage with youth to help them believe and see they belong in these places and when we're doing that we got to have a diverse group there it's got to be diverse it has to be multiple and diverse pbs kids is going to be starting at three year olds for this because if they don't see the mirrors at three years old and they decide they don't belong they don't go back they don't go back so we have to be doing this early and we have to be constructing the design of these interventions through and when we do you start seeing starting with the glimmers i do belong in the stem i could do these kinds of things these are exciting and where they belong so we need there's a lot of things that have done but we're seeing really positive signs and again the larger the launch studio the research says when they have a meaningful career conversation in middle and high school they can actually calculate the wage earning increase for each one for each one that's amazing to me and the size of the effect is higher when we talk about buy pocket and we talk about youth with disabilities that's where we get the biggest bump in those gains so um so these are some of the these are what i'm saying is it's not so i can go to a state and say the state has wisconsin's doing some great work massachusetts we're trying we're working hard there are some moments in areas that are happening but we know what it is that is the spark and now we're trying to figure out how do we build capacity within schools and from the state on down and it takes access to some of the things that we're going to be talking about the report to make that happen so there are a number 65 or so you know indicators that you looked at i don't know how however many data points you collected are there certain things that you think based on the data that states could prioritize that somewhat low hanging fruit in order to make a progress soon yeah i think it has to start with aligning language and initiatives so when you talk about a personalized career and academic plan and it's all about workforce development where's our department of labor where's our commerce right where's the health and human services all these different groups need to come together and say we're all part of that process right and so what we saw we were really disturbed by was when the perkins five and the perkins five is the is the career and tech ed code word right so states had to put up their plan for how they were going to do this how they would involve middle school if they wanted to and all the things they were going to do in these new plans and it was all and it's very exciting and they forgot to mention their personalized career and academic plan and it's like well if this is a cornerstone of what you're doing and you know it's there in your state why are these dots being connected so even within the education one department over isn't seeing the connection we need to start drawing the connection across the whole state so we're coming together with a common vision of what we're trying to do and so i think that's that's low hanging to me that's just a meeting right and now we know how to use zoom so that's even easier than it was before the pandemic right so so i'm pretty sure we can get this done but i was worried i won't say this name to state unless we're at the bar later but um there was a state that we were working with on two different national groups and the gr and it was became clear to me about four months in they've never talked to each other they've never talked to they've never talked to each other and they're even in the same meetings but they've never talked about what each other's doing and we're like trying to do a case study to say you know there's this great thing going on really but but you're not really wait a minute i'm just realizing you really don't know what's going on there and so we did connect the dots but this is the kind of stuff that should be happening naturally yeah and i think that's that's the easiest low hanging the other one which mobilizing our philanthropic organizations okay because they can help demonstrate and when you have demonstration projects that helps the state realize where we can invest dollars so i'm not saying we should start with state dollars i am saying we'll need those eventually in federal but it's like asa is funding a lot of schools to try this out make this happen well then we need to evaluate we need to study showcase and put on a pedestal those that are doing great and as we do that we can start to see how we can get this work done in a way that we can scale so that's a little bit more on the investment and then it's business and industry what's really going to make it happen is when we have our business and industry which does a great job with our political officials providing support around a common plan but also opening up their businesses for those role models for making sure and really thinking about what they can do ibm i can't wait to hear i'm so excited to have lydia up here but the p-tech and some of these other things that are going on are phenomenal so that is another it's not so much that's a low-hanging but there are businesses that are ready to make this happen yeah well perfect segway let's bring lydia into this conversation and before i turn to your work at ibm and hear more about that i would love to hear your perspective you know you did a lot of work at um chiefs for change and the chamber and really good insight on how the u.s system was built and and has sort of created the the tangled complicated uh picture that scott has laid out you want to talk a little bit about what what you saw there yeah i mean i think you know in places that do it well we usually see higher ed the community higher ed the business community and the k-12 system with a com with a community plan like an economic development plan and then everyone can see where do i fit into that plan and whether it's an initial plan or a turnaround plan so you know about 15 years ago ohio i'll use a you know date and lost big employers they had factories there people there they had you know great standard of living but they needed to keep thousands of people employed sinclair community college the chamber came together with the employer community with the governor and they said okay what are we going to do to save it we're going to have bio ohio we're going to do biopharmaceutical manufacturing we're going to do skills mapping and we'll figure out how we close the gap in training family stayed kept their kids in public school tied right these career paths to biopharmaceutical careers they could see it they could be it there was a lot of energy around it and it worked that can happen a lot yeah we used to hold up those kinds of examples when i was at the chamber and we thought this is great we found a great spot we'll hold it up and other people will do it it's a little more complicated right well let me just just we're holding them up right in our report too because ohio in doing that they designed a plan where you're seeing it reflected across all of these other areas i didn't have the dayton context but we're we're bringing them up as one of our examples of a state that's making the language start to line up across these different initiatives so there's a there is a sort of a working formula that can happen that is replicable and there are policies that undergird that and then there's the role of you know in our case for ibm we've been doing p-tech for 10 years we have mentors we expose students to the content in our you know our key areas now we do that with our schools other industry partners do that with therapeutic schools so whether it's a health company working with a school on a health curriculum showing students what are all the rules that are in health it could be health i.t you could be a nurse you could be a you know all of you could be a tech in a lab there are all kinds of things they can be there are some foundational skills their workforce skills that they need some people call them durable skills professional skills you know whatever you want to call them but we make sure students have that have those skills so we provide training for them in those in the program we have mentors we have work based learning we make sure they're paid it's an earn and learn opportunity they often can't afford not to earn money and people like to be compensated for work yeah absolutely it's the right and fair thing to do so we do that with the internships we have we have apprenticeships for older students we have co-op opportunities we've been doing this for a long time and we now have skills built i keep pointing to my ibm colleagues here and i'm going to ask sonya to stand up sonja leeds skills build which is our global online training program which is in 24 languages and 127 countries something like that um earlier this year ibm committed to train 30 million people last year last year tick tock um around the world 30 million people by 2030. so the onesie twozies of you know one school at a time we can't afford to do it and then back to your question about sort of the structure our schools in america were built on right we all know the agricultural calendar that's why we're off in the summer but in addition to that we really only focused on making sure the students at the top were successful and everyone else could do well there were plenty of manufacturing jobs there were plenty of other kinds of jobs where you could live a good life support your family have a home detroit is a prime example of that right we had a booming auto industry you didn't need more than a high school degree now when you think about the structure of work there's creative work at the top where you have to be a lifelong learner and you have to learn to learn in order to keep those jobs get and keep those jobs and then there's the routine work that is likely going to be out of automated or outsourced and in most cases it is now in advanced manufacturing you need to be able to run the machine that runs the line it's not a bunch of people in a line putting rivets in something right so we need to think about that we need to think about that shift we've had sort of bits and pieces of bright spots and changes in policy great models that have worked but we haven't really sort of finished the shift and now we're in the digitization of work yeah and that's where rate ibm talks about innovation innovation innovation innovation all the time and be essential that's actually our internally we have things that we have to think about all the time we have little cards that say be essential that's great love that so are you doing something that matters and to get back to scott's point about students will work harder if they think it matters and if it matters to them if it matters to other people so if they understand that connection in school between what they're learning and what happens for the rest of their lives it will make a big difference in their outcomes and they need someone who can not only show them that but then believe in them and say not only am i showing it to you i believe you can do it exactly yeah and that makes the difference absolutely i think too can i jump in absolutely yeah so where the way we're kind of framing it um is the fourth industrial revolution and it takes two things i'm not even using non-cognitive whatever human skills and it needs advanced human skills right and you need technology skills and so when we get youth looking at those as kind of their template right and they have a lot of really good human skills already and when we show them how to put in a resume even at middle school they're proud of themselves look what i got i didn't realize i didn't realize these were employability skills right that's what we're showing them and then for that purpose i love the un's sustainable development goals and we have them go on a journey and say what impact do you want to have in this world right let's bring it around so we did a civic engagement project with our with one of our community organizations associated latina and they decided that after after doing network science as middle schoolers and learning how networks work seeing the needle which is our that's i know it's an acronym i don't even know what it means but it's an infectious disease unit we're not supposed to use acronyms here we're on acronym safe place here but anyway infectious disease unit they got to see the tour of it their civic engagement project developing a public service announcement on why they wanted their families to get the vaccination it was phenomenal they did it all themselves worked on teams and what came out of that was this blossoming of leadership communication even amongst the most shy these kinds of things right it's it's investing in them to invest in themselves and giving them space amazing things happen so can i just ask for a little clarification for those that are not familiar with the p-tech model can you just talk a little bit about what we've mentioned it a couple of times now it's an early college high school model in most places p-tech is and i say most places because p-tech is around the world and we've it's all over the u.s in most places it's a six-year high school plus two years of post-secondary earning an associate's degree in some places the requirement is that it's a technical associate's degree and that all happens along with work-based learning baked in and mentoring so that's sort of the the big idea we need everybody we don't have the luxury of only focusing on the top 10 percent anymore absolutely and so i ibm is unique in its commitment to early on saying we're not going to wait on the education system to solve this problem for us we see an immediate need for career development um to address our workforce challenges and so we're going to go out and build these programs to make sure we have what we need in the workforce right and you know it is um happening in pockets of excellence throughout the country right there are states that are doing more to push you know washington does a great job at work-based learning i saw last week that the governor of utah announced an adopt a high school program for businesses how do we make business more of a partner in this solution you you are certainly ibm is certainly leading the charge in this way but you are unique in in your view that you are a solution provider to this problem often i think business leans on the education system and sort of complains you're not giving us what we need instead of stepping up and saying how can i help you solve this problem so what do you see from from other employers um and how can we help encourage that conversation that they need to really step up and act so i'd say meet employers where they are and not and they are not a monolithic group so small employers can do different things from medium size employers can do something from different from large size employers it may be anything from if um there's training that's required will they give space and maybe facilitation to the meetings where teachers and school leaders are figuring out what it's going to take right we have an agile process we have squads we come in and do this for different sectors so it may be just facilitating what is it that's going to get an entire district to use these plans it may be providing mentors internships are great when you find a business that does them well there is nothing worse for a kid than having a bad internship right they go in no one talks to them maybe they're shuffling papers around they're sitting in a corner waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with them because i didn't jump in and i'd say there's a difference between having a bad internship and hating your internship right if if you learn that i actually hate to do marketing there's a difference between they just ignored me right so i think there was a valuable learning experience in 100 a internship you didn't enjoy versus a bad internship and so we talked a little bit earlier um about tracking and the fear of what happens if cte what happens with cte so they're you know we're a nation that values our skilled trades we have a long history not as long as europe in apprenticeships and we seem to be a little bit ambivalent about cte and about to what does an advanced version of career and technical education look like we know that you can have technical apprenticeships and we have them at ibm we have how many i think we have 14 most of them carry college credit again it's not or post-secondary credit right it is not college or career it's both in people are not going to just take one direct path they're going to go in and out of work training and school we need them to be able to earn credits work earn money and keep moving forward in their careers as they go along but we need to lean in to what those opportunities look like and what those pathways look like when they start in high school understanding the content exploring the content being exposed to people who do those careers what did it what does it take to become an engineer to become a you know physician's assistant to become whatever it is so that you can say this is for me or this is not for me but you can explore it in meaningful ways and you can get credit for it and you can progress and you can see a place for yourself in it at the end of the road absolutely can i just build off your point about meat business where they're at i think that's really fantastic so let me give some examples of amazing things that you would never expect to happen when you invite the business in and let's take advanced manufacturing because you brought that up when you bring the business in to help redesign your advanced manufacturing curriculum they get excited right and in sheboygan wisconsin they got so excited they raised at least robin correct me but it was like four million four and a half million dollars so that they could build onto the building and then they got the robotics equipment in there because they realized the school was aligning with what they needed amazing and i would say oh that happened yeah well then go up northern wisconsin where nobody lives because it's northern wisconsin unless it's holiday time and ashley furniture donated all the robotics equipment into another school when they realized oh my god you're doing that we want to support you so one of the ways just to draw the line with the personalized career academic plans is one of the things we have is we have student-led parent-teacher conferences so parents can see the great development and the student generated direction that's going on but then we want an exit interview with the business community because the only time business knows what's happening in the school right is annually when they test out here's their scores oh my gosh here's what's going on they need to touch and feel it and in those districts where they see workforce development taking place and they see youth that are very excited and passionate and can explain what they have they don't talk about test scores anymore it becomes insulin they're protected and then they don't have to raise the dollars it's not hard because the business is going to kind of come together so it's a team sport and i think it's really this is a great opportunity for schools to really showcase but also a way to build that bridge with business and we've seen it multiplied across the country it's fantastic greenville south carolina that was another example my my old chamber days bmw put a plant down there yes they did got very involved in the school system changed the whole math curriculum to be aligned with what they needed it yes exactly and that kind of intersection is phenomenal right it's amazing but it's meet them where they are i think that you know on it for business that's a ibm is huge we're a multinational corporation we're 250 000 employees there's a lot that we can do and a lot of the training that we provide through skills build through p-tech is not just about making sure people are ready to come work at ibm we make sure they're prepared at a quality level ibm would expect but that they can go anywhere they don't have to come to ibm they can go work somewhere else at a smaller medium sized company that may not be able to afford to train people spend three to five years there go do something else maybe they end up with us we hope they do but for us it's a it's about an ecosystem where people have what they need to do better yeah wonderful can i segue into the technology sure absolutely so um and don't worry there's gonna be a plug in here just a second but um technology is one of the opportunities and miss challenges right now in this whole process and we have that in our report there's not enough funding to support the basic information right how many of you are familiar with naviance right okay yeah any parent in the room probably you know i got you i know i know i know it's amazing right so that's called a career information system and we need that to get access to finding out as you heard yes go to the internship and realize you really don't want to be a veterinary because you didn't know there was blood involved good time to learn is early right before you go to med school and i've heard students go to med school and then find out too late right but these information systems provide support too and really clarifying and exploring and seeing what's there so they're necessary but we also need other kinds of technology and so i'm going to call out steve here from intellispark working on a personalizing the system so that the counselors can know what the student might be needing right now to continue supporting them as they're moving through the process we need ai to come in and look at their resumes and we have a company that's going out in in vancouver that i'm forgetting their name i apologize um anyway great company where they're using ai to look at their resume and their linked learning and then they're able to come back and say here's the pathways that align in my pathways i mean not the career tech edwards i'm talking about the general pathways right and you want to continue on that pathway well here's the learning opportunities right now in your community online and then here's the post-secondary pathways and other training you can get that is the kind of technology that we need everyone to have access to um and so we've got we've got some things in the works we've got some things that are happening right but we need to we need to invest in that and we need to get that into our communities as we start moving forward yeah so hive was the group i was trying to win that's okay on the technology front so in the past two years the the nature of work has changed dramatically um i don't know if it's necessarily something you looked at in in the report but uh you know we we are hearing you know thousands and thousands of companies that will never go back to an in-person workforce again and so the the condition of career readiness that we were preparing kids for when we started this report has changed dramatically from your standpoint lydia you know how have your programs uh adapted in the last two years to really not only put the important p-tech programs online but help kids think about what virtual work will be in the future and how do you really ensure that we are building kids that are able and adaptable to be able to perform well in that type of environment well i think you know we talked or mentioned the digitization of work and we talk a lot about that at ibm right what does this mean for the work environment what does it mean for the skill sets you need to have what does it mean for what people need to know and be able to do what we have learned is they still need some sort of a capstone more experiential way to demonstrate what they've learned we we are remote a lot a lot of us are remote i mean our my team no one lives in the same place and we're global so we're right that also may be the reality that even if you are back in the office you are not in the same place with the people who are on your team and that is true as we have become more global and so being able to sort of navigate and work in groups and be collaborative when you are not in the same place whether you're in your living room or in your office is something that is just a new reality of work that is not pandemic specific right but certainly exacerbated by pandemic right right i mean there are certainly there are frontline workers there are jobs that will always require people to be where their work is but there are also right new ways of collaborating across space i was about to say time and space eventually that's next year's conference but we are great there are ways of getting smarter and putting information in people's hands so they can make their own good decisions so it isn't just college counselors or career counselors or counselors of other kinds doing the analysis and then telling you what you should do and where you go when you should get there it's giving you the data about your own learning and then insights through ai and other things that ibm also loves and does and saying if you like this how about learning something you know learning this here's a recommended pathway so there are ways that we can use what we call tech for good use our tech and talent make sure that we are giving people good information to make good decisions and let them you know run down their path as fast as they want to go and support them as they do it yeah that's great let me can i bring it down in the school setting so exactly we in in the personalized career and academic plans what we're really encouraging our schools to think about is right internships is one level of work-based learning but work-based learning is happening in the school all the time we call it project-based learning we call it civic engagement now the issue is you're going to get the academic credit but how do we get the workforce development credit kansas has done it for us they built this beautiful crosswalk between these kinds of skill all the skills you're talking about the advanced communication skills the getting along the leadership they built a beautiful rubric analysis so that now the counselor or whoever that specialist is can look over the top of all that and say let's check off the boxes of the things you're learning it's much more than the academic and it's also helped because they have to it's not just do they have the skills but are they aware they have the skills and are they aware of the relevance and importance of these skills because when they go to interview at ibm it's not saying i went to school it's here's what i can do and i'd be remiss if i did not bring up the fact that badges and certifications have completely changed what students right you can do smaller chunks of learning and earn a badge earn a certification and show that you know what you're able to do you can carry that with you wherever you go right and it's sort of so a skills first hiring that's what ibm talks about we're doing our best to walk the talk every time you post a job you have to look at a forum that says does this job really require a four-year degree or does it just require a set of skills to do this job well and can this person continue to learn and that's where having great alternative routes to gaining skills makes all the difference in the world absolutely that it is not just degrees first and people need to understand that because if you are a student who is in who is an opportunity youth and you think that there is nothing left for you that is not true that's not true so just plugging another panel tomorrow that we are doing on uh pathways post-secondary education pathways that that piece of of credentialing of uh badging how we assess that is really important but you know opening up this conversation that it is not just about a four-year degree but there are many meaningful ways to get the education and training necessary to a good career not just a job but a good career path students can start earning those in high schools absolutely absolutely but also think remember that this generation is going to live and i was using saying to 100 i'm getting corrected i'm hearing 150 now that some are determined they're going far i'm sorry at 16 is not a time to say i've got my decision what they need are tools right they need tools and they need to believe in themselves and then they're gonna they're gonna continue and we call them navigation skills right it's just how to navigate so every single graduate from high school every single one should have some kind of badge credential that says i can go right now into the world of work and make a liberal wage and i'm talking like double minimum wage is what i want to shoot for right just keep it at that level every single graduate has to have that they have to understand the value and the trajectory of a two-year program and the kinds of opportunities as well as a four-year so it's not am i going to college or not am i going no you're living to 100 you've got to learn how all these systems interplay and stuff happens right the reason why the college completion rates are are challenging isn't just because they're not ready that's part of it stuff happens mental health challenges families get illnesses things happen right we have to have backup plans so they know okay if that occurs i'm not done i'm taking a break and then i'm re-engaging that sense of purpose is what they should be graduating with when they leave high school and so it's yeah i'm stuck no i was going to say one of the advantages one of the advantages to asynchronous online learning is that when those things happen it's not a deal breaker for you my god you know what this is so funny do you have time for fun you may of course all right so i'm working with this uh school it was a tech college and they were getting they were losing 90 of their students in in this pre in this math class right 90 we're not making it through and i said so um it doesn't look like it's working and you know what they said it was cracked bit well how can you say that you're losing 90 of your students right so these are students that are coming in that are already had to dig a hole because they're not in the actual credits right they're in the pre-credits or whatever you want to call them right they got to dig themselves out well they got families they got child care they've got transportation issues and so this idea of it not being asynchronous meant that these these youths they would miss a few days come back in and you know how math is so sequential sorry you've missed the week you're done so it wasn't a synchronous authentic this was i'm not going to say how long ago it was a few years back i said what you need is a lab they need to be able to come into a lab and start with where they left off every single one which they did and as a result now the youth can come in and they can make up grade levels and we saw this in high school too they'll make up grade levels once they're engaged and they can get it but maybe they've got a burst for three weeks and then something else happens so we have to redesign the asynchronous and that whole personalized learning from that piece of it has been awesome in that way but they also need caring encouraging supports but it really changes education from being a classroom to a tutorial to a business like atmosphere you're coming in to get your work done and i'm here to give support as needed or to step away so yeah these are these are game changing in the sense of things but it also means different kinds of teaching and and being and being willing to take the risk of trying something differently because that is where we always sort of bump up against well it hasn't done that way before so we're not going to do that way we're not going to try um and i think what you're saying is where those risks are are happening we're seeing really good great results we can use technology to our advantage to transform what high school looks like for students so they can be in a brick and mortar place a few days they can be learning at home they can be making up you know taking courses or or training for credentials in the summer on the weekends breaks right it's a mix and that mix doesn't only have to be available to adults absolutely yeah it can also be available to students and they don't only have to be the overage under credit students in order to take advantage of and in most school systems those are only alternative programs for students who have not been successful in the general at or traditional place there's no reason why that isn't what school should just look like right and you know it's students are speaking with their feet right they're walking they're they're trying new things asa our organization last year reached 11 million kids in with educational videos through tick tock you know that's where they are that's where they want to consume information as you said earlier large content following for students on youtube it is not just about showing up at school and i'm going to learn what you teach me and i'm going to take in this information and we'll be done they are seeking other ways to get this information and we need to think more deliberately about how we help them find the opportunities that are right for them it's not just meeting businesses where they are right and i would say designing for them designing learning the way they learn and a lot of this design is not a financial problem it's an imagination problem and that's really where we have to start building out how can we see what it might look like how can we imagine the differences and and have an online support system like you said for the asynchronous learning so that i'm not going to school all day right or i can get tested out of these different things early college to go out there and find it maybe a lot more exciting to do it on a college campus right just making these multiple options that fit around the individual and it really is important as we talk about individual students with disabilities because there's lots of things that are going on with their they may have hidden talents how do we connect them that we had a maker space here um down the way how do we create the more maker spaces and they're finding that our kids with the most significant kinds of emotional challenges you put them in a maker space and they thrive and they were shocked because they had no idea of how regulated they become when they're interested in learning right who knew so we have a couple of questions that are coming in the app and if you would like to um if you would like to ask questions please feel free to do so there so let me go through a few of these uh someone asked i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the great resignation what are your thoughts on its causes and what can business schools do to address it or can business schools businesses and schools businesses and schools you know i'll first say the disclaimer this you know these views belong to lydia logan they're not ibm you know so some people had to resign some people realized oh my god if this is a 100 year pandemic and this is what my life is like i need to do something different and they left they got up and they walked out and they said life has to be more meaningful and how great would it have been if they had discovered that in high school that they were in the wrong job and so i think there we were already seeing people not staying in jobs for long periods of time my parents generation you got a good job you stayed for 50 years or however long you had a big retirement party at the end with a check a gold watch and a cruise right you know and then that was a good you know that was a good thing um i remember talking to my parents about you know business school and they were like oh you just need a cut check every month with benefits so that i like the gig economy there is is a transformation of work happening i just learned about a site called fiverr where you can like outsource your yeah so you all are nodding so people can do what they love stop that do what they love i'm going to make that right with technology making things better easier for other people it may be sustainable development goal challenges dennis's here from ibm he runs call for code challenges where we get students together at different levels to address global societal challenges people love it we have thousands and thousands of students from around the world who enter and they are not developers they are kids who are like i think i could do something about clean water and i'm going to get a group of people together and we're going to do it so the great resignation was about people being dissatisfied just you know realizing that they had other choices and they were going to take advantage of them having these skills i'm going to bring it back right that allow you to navigate redirect re-skill and try something new those are the skills that we need to make sure everyone has along with some resiliency along with feeling like they can do it and having that instilled in an early age but it's learning how to learn it's being able to use technology it's being able to learn something new and apply it yeah that's what you need for the rest of your life is i think what is it on the internet like it's doubling the amount of information every three hours or something used to be every like three days or three months so if there's always new information and there's always there are always advances people need to be able to roll with that and we need to train them to do that we need to give them the skills they need to do that for the rest of their lives so a similar question i think you may have answered this a little bit but questions specifically to how ibm addresses uh the soft skills for those students who have gained technical skills from certification or alternative credential programs how do you specifically look at soft skill development at the ib through the ibm programs i'm going to ask the anitas if you don't want to we're not mic'd that's exactly oh we can pinch because that's built into skills build it's input it is built into the p-tech program it's built into skills built it is very much something that we recognize is a requirement to be successful in the world of work so when you answered the question [Laughter] so it's an integral part of all the courses so no matter what you do on skills build or even other ibm technical courses you do go through a series of what we call professional skill courses which really address all those whether it's creative thinking troubleshooting teamwork presentation you know all of those are foundational skills and then we also do other ones like design thinking and agile because we do believe no matter what you do no matter what career you follow you need those skills so those are part of every single program that you go through the other thing that you know we're ibm and everyone is works with us because we're huge so adobe we have a partnership with adobe and we have design badges on adobe so you can and it's all free by the way for those of you who have not been on skills build this is where i'm going to make my skills fantastic it is it is completely free log in create an account go for it earn badges um but it is important like we are bringing in content from our corporate partners and offering it for free to people it's wonderful wonderful and that's how you get to the 30 million right so um one question here and then i'm gonna and add to this question a little bit so someone asked how have you seen students sense of agency change when they embrace their skills and how do you measure it and and and to that point of measuring something that is very complicated to measure when looking at the data what what important data pieces are missing um from the report that you really wish you had access to yeah so so so we we it's a really good it's good it's a two-part and they're connected so the way in which we look at student uh the three things we want students to come out of this process this pcap personalized career academic plan process we want them to become proactive resilient and adaptable those are the big those are the big pieces and and that pro activity which is what you're describing what does that look like well when you have a student-led parent-teacher conference and the student says here's what my future goals are looking like and the next question is or the next answer to the next question is and here's what i've been working on this year to be able to address it and here's what my plan is to do next year you have it it's all right there so that part of it we actually model into the process and the description and we've done the analyses and we found that those individuals who were able to say those things there's some here's my future goals usually three here's these things they're they're more resilient they're they're showing up as more they have higher self-efficacy they're managing their health better they're less stressed academically right all the things which we could also call social emotional learning skills they're getting those you can see that and the ones who are saying oh i'm going to be a veterinarian but they can't describe the rest of it they don't have those okay so so we've got the data to say we know that that's what works but the question is how do you scale that so i'll bring ai into this imagine if we had 1400 of those paragraphs of students and we could use machine learning to figure out if we can go with a natural language processing strategy so that schools can do an activity to see how they're doing and what to what extent the students are doing that that's what we're working on right now i've got two ai faculty from boston university we've got a grad student analyzing the first part of it and then we hope to get the funding to be able to build this out because i get asked this question once a month if not more because once we get excited we want to know how we can see the formative change in this case it's kind of the summative to say at the end of the day did we move them along and we have to have this so i think we have the solution we just have to get the machine learning process in place but i and what i'm so excited about is this is going to be in spanish right we don't have to this doesn't have to just be an english only kind of system we've got to design it for multiple languages so we can allow them to pull this out and then get teachers the english language arts teachers designing that that activity to build out their best you know vocabulary and their best communication about what's going on right something they can be proud of and then you put in the system and we then we allow the school to see how are we doing we allow the district to say which schools are doing it the state to say what districts are going well so we can continue to build our capacity forward so it's i feel like it's right there i hope i hope to know by may if we've gotten the the pilot work um figured out but yeah there's there's a there there the problem we have is too often we want to take a look at those online systems right so we've mentioned naviance and there's zello and there's ci career information systems there's all these different models out there and what people do is hey well let's just see if they went on and used it well that doesn't equate right it just tells me it doesn't tell us what participation is not necessarily participation doesn't do it and that's the challenge and yet we don't have anything else right now to be able to generate that piece so that's kind of where we're moving with that did you want to comment yeah we we have um personas that we focus on and design for and we're in a constant around those one of them is how do we make sure girls around the world are exposed to stem and so we have ibm volunteer events where they work with girls usually around the middle school age we do it in canada taiwan india and italy we we do a little bit of it in other places but it's really big there and girls work with ibmers they come together they work in groups in india they built drones in taiwan they did curated learning paths on they all did curated learning paths on skills build in italy they worked on doing chat bots wow they programmed chat bots and then they made it work by the end of the day it was working and we interviewed so you're asking how great what are the outcomes it's all it's sort of like the pregnancy question the teen pregnancy question how do we know it work no one got pregnant right so we don't know what would have happened to these girls if they hadn't come but we do interview them afterwards and they said i had no idea i had the capability to do this and it has opened up their minds that confidence level yeah and they were in most cases with women who were ibmers who have said to them this is what i do this is part of my job that's great i do amazing things with technology and you can do that too and today is just the start and so they have found at least with our girls in india they have continued to participate in stem courses and look and seek out activities some of them have taken on you know on training their parents and they've sent us their stories and there are all kinds of amazing you know success stories now that's not the you know peer-reviewed scientific data no we don't need that we need the stories right the story but we are seeing huge changes in attitude in confidence in interest of girls who have participated in the program and they come back over and over again that's wonderful so we're going to end on that high note and and you can certainly reach us in the app if you have more follow-up questions um lydia logan from ibm scott solberg from bu and the coalition for career development center thank you for joining us thank you for sticking with us thank you yes [Music]