good morning and thank you so much for joining us uh you are in for a treat for the next 60 minutes and i hope you'll engage using the engage button on your phone if you were with with this event because your questions will come right up and i will promise you your questions will take priority over mine my name is jane oates i'm the president of workignation a national non-profit media entity that's totally devoted to telling the stories like you're going to hear today we tell stories about transitions from education to work and that those two words really define my three fellow panelists today who i'm going to ask to i'm going to give them the opportunity to introduce themselves and their organization jamie can i pick on you first of course gene you you've picked on me for 30 years so why not now i'm jamie marisotis i'm the ceo of lumina foundation lumina is a private foundation we're based in indianapolis we have a national focus to focus on increasing high quality post-high school educational attainment our goal is that 60 of americans have a high quality degree certificate certification or their credential by 2025. since we started this work in 2008 12 million more americans have a post-secondary credential than when we started so we started at um 38 as a country we're now at 52 we believe that high quality learning is key in the transition to successful work and a good life i'm lydia logan i'm the vice president of global education and workforce development at ibm with the csr team that's a mouthful we are focused at csr on providing skilling for free around the world using ibm technology and talent and we're doing that through a few of our programs you'll hear about later today we also have made skills first hiring a priority and we're focused on removing the four-year degree requirement for openings at ibm kenan harrison vice president of workforce partnerships at reverture and revisits the largest employer of entry-level software engineering and emerging technical talent in the united states um has ranked by linkedin to take that for what it's worth and we're looking to hire several thousand new nascent software engineers tech professionals um across different i.t disciplines and every single person that we hire into these roles goes through a three-month apprenticeship as a paid apprenticeship and then what we try to do is launch their career and we've had a great deal of success we've done this for about ten thousand people in the last eight or nine years and so really excited to be here and an absolute honor to be included well it's really exciting i hope you'll agree with me to have all three of you here and jamie since you outed us as being uh nerds together for three decades or more uh i don't i just want to start with you because when people come to something that's talking about learn and earn they immediately think registered apprenticeships and we're not going to gloss over those they're very important but i'd like you to kind of give an overview of uh what are learn and earn programs and why yeah let's begin with why the why question learn and earn is really important because there's a rising demand for talent in the united states and we need to do a better job of better connecting the learning with the working that people are doing in a world where technology technology technology-mediated learning and technology-mediated work are increasingly driving what we do and at the same time our ability to prepare people for human work the work that only humans can do is going to be increasingly important the learn and earn models i think are really important at this critical time in society because they allow people to ratchet their way up the the cycle of the pathways of learning that will allow them to get better jobs better life opportunities ultimately allow them to be successful so yes certainly registered apprenticeships are one model of learn and earn but so are internships so are co-op models you know so are practicums and and you know uh we we see increasingly that work study programs and different kinds of work study efforts are all part of the the learn and earn model i think learning earn is actually important at this moment right now as we are trying to figure out what we're emerging from are we emerging from the pandemic or into an endemic or whatever this is because one of the things that we learned in the pandemic is that that demand for talent is really changing rapidly it's been accelerated because of the pandemic we know that workers of color particularly women of color were impacted disproportionately during the pandemic and we've got to do a better job a better job of preparing those individuals for this changing world of work and at the same time we know candidly that higher education has developed a brand problem the brand problem for higher education is that people's belief that they need to go to college is actually declining and i think that that brand problem can be addressed in part by learn and earn efforts that allow people to be more focused on the applied nature of the learning on their ability to understand that there is both a financial reward and a learning reward a career trajectory reward that ultimately gets them on the pathway of long-term success so to me this moment of crisis the crisis accelerated by by covid the crisis that has emerged for higher education declining enrollments increasing questions about about higher education can be solved in part by these learn and earn models well i i think i think you put it beautifully especially giving me a good segue to lydia because i wanna you know i think the the word talent is at the front of everybody's mind you know everybody the war for talent uh the great resignation which i don't quite understand why that that term really went well but uh why is ibm doing what they're doing and by the way i want to be open with everyone lydia has three programs that i'm going to hit on today and i may confuse all of you i love p-tech i love and i'm one want you to talk about skills build and i also love stem for girls and you're probably doing other things but i there are three different programs that i just want to outline for the audience that we could be talking about but i want you to tell me why is ibm doing this i mean they're not going to hire all these people that go to p-tech high schools why are they doing this so we do it it's a it's a social good mission but it also has to do with making sure there is an ecosystem of talent prepared for jobs that are available now and in the future so expanding opportunity to jobs in the tech sector for women who have traditionally been kept out underrepresented minorities and people returning to the workforce after having been out that's why we're doing this work we do it in the us and we do it around the world we do it starting and secondary and in some cases you mentioned our stem for girls program we have a program that starts exposure for girls right we know that girls have been underrepresented girls and women in tech so we start early by exposing them to mentors to experiential learning where they can do project-based learning building chat bots or drones and really understanding that this is a career path they might want to choose and what would it look like for them to try it and stick with it so we have that we have p-tech which is a six-year early college high school model that's also around the world there are about 300 p-tech schools that has an industry partnership where ibm provides mentors earn and learn opportunities for the students as well as a career-based curriculum in school during the program so we have a lot of ways that we reach people we also have a newer program called skills build which is global we have online learning with badges and other kinds of certifications starting at the high school level and going all the way up through post-secondary our belief is that people are not taking one path from high school to college to work we know that but our training programs have not looked like that and recognized it and that's what we're doing at ibm so we have something for people regardless of where they are they have an on-ramp for training whether they come work for us or work somewhere else we have only about 11 of our entry-level jobs that are you know where we would hire somebody with training in no degree entry level but we have a lot of clients and partners who need people who fit that profile since we have removed from most jobs that where we could a four-year degree requirement we have about 20 percent of jobs at ibm that no longer have that as a requirement for employment so it really is something we're leaning into it is not just uh we are walking the talk wow good for you because i mean that that bachelor's degree required even though many of us have one it's just unnecessary for so many jobs and it really has left a lot of talent on the table and kudos to opportunity at work another good entity out there that's putting uh real attention on stars i really like that okay ken and you heard a lot about ibm i know it's hard for you right but i bet a lot of people everybody's heard of lumina everybody's heard of ibm everybody hasn't heard of revit tell us a little bit about your model yeah absolutely um you know we have a pretty good brand among our clients and our clients are made up almost exclusively of fortune 500 organizations or similarly sized organizations that aren't companies right large government bodies etc the point is that we have historically worked with organizations that have large tech needs and the reason that we do that is because we create apprenticeships bespoke to the needs of our industry clients so what we're doing is you can kind of think of it as a backwards-mapped training program or or workforce development enablement solution i really really love the term ecosystem lydia used because that is really what it is we believe that opportunity is highly concentrated but talent is widely distributed and how do we bring opportunity to talent as opposed to forcing talent to find opportunity and eliminating barriers creating clearly articulated pathways to skills and competencies that make sense is really what we're all about and so our model is a hundred percent outcomes based and we hire everyone as a w-2 full-time employee for this apprenticeship pathway but the real key is that they are set up with skills and competencies that make them marketable to our clients but also long-term future-proof career folks we have a 90 4-year retention rate with our clients in tech 90 of the time when our folks leave us and go to work for our client full time which is generally between 12 and 18 months after they start working with us they're still there 90 of the time four years later in a software engineering job that is unheard of unheard of thank you lydia um you would know better than i would and so i i think what we're about going forward because what we've done is talent enablement right now the problem is no longer that people who are interested in tech are not getting tech jobs in my opinion the problem is that there literally aren't enough people who believe that a tech job is on the table for them to fill the roles that exist and so what we want to do is empower more people to believe fundamentally grow the pie grow the pie of people who believe that this is even on the radar and so maximizing participation in tech and what you guys are doing at ibm is absolutely a huge part of that and we want to create an ecosystem with not just employers not just tech creators like ibm like salesforce like pega uipath etc but also from work from a workforce partnership standpoint how do we engage with talent the sources of talent where they are right now to provide a pathway into these jobs that makes sense for everyone regardless of background so you've brought up uh i think all of you brought up the need for diversity and the populations that have been ignored jump ball question let's make this a conversation how do we hold ourselves accountable for that everybody's out there talking about dei right now uh everybody's talking about inequity but let's take it out three years how will we have looked back to say we did what we talked about doing how will we hold ourselves accountable what do you think well i can tell you this i'm looking at my stats here that were sent to me by our we measure everything at ibm at ibm removing the four-year degree requirement resulted in a more diverse applicant and hiring of new color talent so that's what we call the high-wage high school non-degree uh 63 increase in underrepresented minority applicants mix for roles require a degree not requiring a degree sorry and a 35 improvement in hiring people who did not have a degree so we are measuring it we are looking at what our numbers are every year and trying to do better jamie what's luminous going to do to hold people accountable yeah well first of all so lumina is an organization as i said that's focused on increasing post-secondary attainment but we describe ourselves as an equity-first organization so everything that we do has a racial equity lens and so our efforts are designed to both increase attainment and reduce the gaps in in racial equity um without that i think it's just a false promise for society and for our collective well-being if we continue to increase attainment but don't narrow those gaps particularly for african-americans latinos or hispanics and native americans so i think it's really really really critical that we focus on that to me there is a measurement issue here right which is that you know what are we doing to actually provide more opportunities for learners of color than what we've had before and i come back to what i said at the beginning which is that in this economy what was revealed to many people who hadn't seen it before is how much workers of color women of color in particular have been impacted by these barriers that are in place and these are historic barriers these are not new barriers but but these are barriers that have been revealed in ways that are really important so finding ways to create gaps to put equity first in the hiring processes put equity first in the college admission and completion processes making sure that we you know one of the biggest areas of focus for limited foundation right now is community colleges and making sure that the community college efforts are actually designed not just to bring students in but make sure students succeed in the community colleges many of you know that success rates in community colleges in too many community colleges are far too low so improving success rates for students in community colleges is a critical metric and one of the things that we're putting our thumb on the scale of whether it be in our work on employer align credentials around student success or or the efforts around increasing participation getting people in the door from the beginning it all has to have the thumb on the scale of equity absolutely i think you know we talk about eliminating degree requirements and i think the numbers you just shared bear it out um but but looking at degrees as an indicator and understanding historically what are the issues the total number of bachelor's degrees in computer science are awarded to black and african-american talent in this country in 2020 was 7 747 total across the entire country there were two million undergraduate degrees awarded across the entire country in that time frame 7 700 bachelors of computer science were awarded to black town from all universities not just hbcus there were 750 awarded at hbcus so what we're talking about here are huge macro issues right same holds for for hispanic american talent same holds for female talent six almost sixty percent of all degrees in the united states are awarded to women twenty percent are of bachelor's of science and computer science are awarded women we've got a problem right um and it's an empowerment problem i believe it is an enablement problem we have to help people understand that tech careers are possible and what the work that the folks on this panel are doing is absolutely critical but we have to and we have to empower also industry to invest in workforce development and talent enablement you guys are already ahead of the game but we have to empower the entire industry to to prove to them to prove to industry that if you invest in talent if you invest in workforce development you can solve the opportunity gap but it's not going to happen by itself well i want to talk for a second about uh jamie i was so interested when lumina expanded its its goal to include certifications i want to talk for a second about if we stop talking as much about a degree and start talking more about alternative pathways to get the skills that you need for jobs what about quality you know how do we really talk quality and how do employers recognize quality i mean jane's credential to do x doesn't mean anything to ibm how do we make sure employers understand that but let's talk about quality yeah so for let me say first before i get the quality that you know two things have to be true uh one is that all learning should count that we should not leave any learning on the table right so when we talk about things like non-credit learning that's got to go away all learning should count when it comes to preparing people for work and for life that that's that's that's one thing the second thing is that credentials matter okay so i want to be clear that in these skills-based hiring models they're still measuring what people know and can do they're trying to figure out what the skills are and trying to figure out how to credential it it's not it's not a bachelor's degree that's fine but there's still an effort to measure what people know and can do and to me those credentials are really important it's one of the reasons why this whole theme of pathways of learning is really important what we've got to do is get people on the ladder of opportunity and pull them through the process so they continue to gain higher levels of skills both content knowledge and generalizable skills the things that people you know i think erroneously call soft skills but they're really the durable skills there are things that matter long term critical thinking and problem solving and communicating and their ability to have these these human traits of being ethical and empathetic and compassionate that are increasingly important in a human centered work environment you know those things are going to be really really important so in order to measure that we need better systems than simply doing what we do so far which is measuring you know writing capacity measuring numeracy and literacy you know measuring those kinds of things we've also got to have better tools to understand you know how do we measure critical thinking how do we measure problem solving communicating those kinds of things and in this effort in in learning outcomes measurement we are still behind in my view in that in terms of being able to do that we've made some progress so the quality of the credentials is really important third-party validation of those credentials is really important but we need to make sure that as we bring people through the system they have more learning opportunities and more efforts to add credentials and allow them to advance up that ladder of opportunity that's really really critical to long-term success for us i would say probably for all of us on this panel we went through a traditional learning environment in other words probably i'm guessing now we graduated from high school went to college probably got a four-year degree that model is no longer the viable model for the vast majority of people in this country it is a continuous model i don't like the term lifelong learning by the way um it sounds like a life sentence is what it sounds like uh from that from the consumer perspective but the idea is that we've got to continually upskill our own capacities if we're going to be successful and that means that getting people into these learning opportunities and continuing to bring them through on this virtuous cycle of learning and earning is going to be really really important i think it's also important to recognize we need those equivalencies right it isn't an either or so we have uh 25 registered apprenticeships in 17 states and 30 cities wow some of those many of those we work with the american council on education and other organizations on uh certifications and credits our let's see which one is it software engineering apprenticeship carries 45 credits so we recognize that it is not degrees that we're not interested in degrees or we don't want people going after them it's that they should have options depending on where they are at any given point in their career trajectory opt into for an apprenticeship earn and learn at the same time work for ibm for a while leave go work somewhere else leave go to school take those 45 credits you earned put them towards a degree or something else right you it should be fluid doesn't have to be an ecosystem idea and it also shouldn't be either or i chose the apprenticeship but it didn't carry any credit so then when i go back to school i'm starting back at the beginning we need to make it additive and to jamie's point all learning should count i think to be fair to higher ed we're seeing sea change the beginnings of sea change around pla around recognition of prior learning i think there are innovative institutions bachelor's degree associates degree awarding two year three two year four-year masters et cetera that are recognizing experience for credit and they are um but i think it's not systematic i think it's not the norm right still i think pathways that are linear are jamie to your point outdated and obsolete we have the technology so to speak we can do this this can be compressed we can we can create pathways lydia similar to what you're saying we're doing a similar thing right we're hiring people who have associate's degrees or 60 credit hours um we're training them as normal putting through apprenticeship we're aligning that apprenticeship for a year of bachelor's degree credit and then we're paying for them to get the remaining 30 credits while they're working for us full-time as a software engineer so now we've created basically a pathway where you can graduate from high school and then less than four years later have an associate's degree a bachelor's degree in i.t or cyber uh five to seven industry competencies skills certifications eighteen months of work experience and be on track to making seventy five eighty ninety thousand dollars a year in less than four years from the day you graduate from high school and for no out of pocket cost beyond what you paid for your associate's degree those 60 credit hours so creating condensing pathways to eliminate time to completion and basically build a co-op into the degree as opposed to or basically build a degree into the co-op as opposed to to build a co-op into the degree are the types of things that we need to be doing that everyone should be every company in america that has talent needs should be doing something like that and no debt well i was going to say i don't think no debt no out-of-pocket cost yeah that's right that's a nuance right right 87 i think it's 87 of people um in this country don't pay a dime through pell and throw their financial aid for an associate's degree um at last count and so for that group theoretically you can get a degree in less than four years with work experience for no money yeah this is key though i just want to underscore this point that ken is making which is that um the the fact that that you can go through this and we all know what the biggest concern about higher ed is right now right which is debt and increasing levels of debt accumulation learn and earn models um actually reduce the need for borrowing and in many cases to kenneth's point they actually result in no borrowing which is the the ideal model if if you can get there but you know jane if if higher ed has a brand problem learn and earn models have a brand identity problem which is that not enough people know about absolutely that's right the the revenue models of the world and and and you know well people know about some of the ibm work let's let's be honest but that's because ibm has made long time investments in this space that has helped to give it some some visibility these need to be the norm not the exception in my view and so this idea that you know so these are not new models but they are models that need new visibility in the environment that we're in and we need to do a better job of investing whether it is in public-private partnership whether it is in government investment programs go back to your topic for a minute ago about registered apprenticeships on the one hand registered apprenticeships are a great idea they're a really good idea but they are a tiny fraction of what we do in the system right six hundred thousand registered apprenticeships a year 10 and a half million students enrolled in community colleges right there is no no contest there in that sense well one of the reasons is that at the federal level we've spent less than two billion dollars in six years on registered apprenticeship programs so we've got to do a better job of actually and again it's this is not government's problem to solve but the point is that we've got to do a better job of elevating these learn and earn models giving them greater visibility resources if they need it but helping the learners understand the learner workers understand that these opportunities are available to them that allow them to apply what they're doing now and build their skills for the future yeah and i think you know all these models because we've talked a lot about this that are you is is higher ed the enemy absolutely not the way we came through higher ed is going to exist until the end of time the idea is we've just expanded the menu the other opportunities are just as valuable just as viable and maybe better now i want to switch gears because i'm the audience is really engaged and you can see the questions popping up here but one really interesting we have a lot of educators at this conference our tech jobs going to be obsolete as robotics and ai develop further how's that one now you wrote a book on this one no hell no you know pardon my bluntness but of course not but you know it is both and again um opportunity at work is a is a good example it's elevated some of this idea tech jobs are not just jobs in the tech sector tech jobs exist in most sectors now and so thinking about tech jobs as not being uh simply uh existing in in one vertical in our economy i think is is really important at the same time technology-mediated work is going to be increasingly important for the vast majority of jobs and you know here you know what i've tried to describe is this idea that we need human machine complementarity making sure that what we do complements what the machines can do we know what the machines are good at they're good at speed repetition algorithmic uh reduction but humans have these traits you know that ethical decision making that compassion that ability to be collaborative to do the kinds of things we're doing right now right real human interaction we need to make sure that the the tech jobs are not just jobs for people that are going to do what machines can do they've got to use their human abilities to work with the machines and allow them to complement each other in you know in pursuit of the greater productivity the higher levels of success that come from that work and safety i mean i'm glad there's machines to do a lot of the jobs where humans used to break their back you know i mean that that's a good thing but let's talk a little bit more what's going to happen as as ibm and your your fortune 500 clients uh get rid of some of the lower level tech jobs what happens then they're not going to there's going to be some jobs that are eliminated and some some jobs that grow give us an idea give the audience an idea of what those areas of growth probably are into the future i mean i'll give you one it's cyber security right that was not a growth area just a few years ago and now everyone is talking about cyber security it is not just ibm needing cyber security it is almost every business that has data and needs to protect it and so we have pathways and training around cyber security threat analysts different kinds of uh data analysts who can go in and look at cyber security issues so that's a whole new set of training that used to be sort of military yeah you know uh it it it lived in a very narrow slice of the workforce and now it's everywhere and uh we are far more aware of it now than probably ever before so that's a growth area while other things may be automated or outsourced there will always be a new burgeoning field and we need to be ready for that i think in addition to that there are training the training that we have on skills build and other training programs at ibm again all free all available to anyone out there data analysts there are skill sets that apply across job roles whether those are job roles in tech or not and those are things people should be looking at as right opening access to the tech sector to jobs and to other pathways that they may not have considered they're sort of foundational in a re-entry or an upskilling opportunity for people what's interesting is about this question is you know you can kind of make assumptions one way or the other about what is going to be automated what isn't based on our best guess right we're in we're in this in this space several hundred million enterprise applications will need to be developed worldwide in the next three to five years based on investment current investment rates of investment in tech there are about 30 million developers in the world currently so that alone should tell you that we've there's an incredible talent crunch happening now it's just going to get worse if we don't empower more people to believe that they can do these jobs i think low code no code jobs are coming in huge huge numbers um i think jamie to your point virtually every company is a tech company or at least has a tech job or several thousand in certain cases and loco no code jobs cyber security jobs i think jobs traditional coding development jobs they're not going to go away these are the manufacturing jobs of the 21st century these are hard skills no one can take these skills away from you once you have them and they're going to be in demand for basically ever right and the other thing too is this is our space we're an entry-level i.t consulting firm that's how we operate with our clients and we're also a workforce development organization a talented organization but there is a significant rate of churn and upward mobility in tech jobs where someone who's in the trenches develop writing code today three years from now it may well be in a management position right there is going to be a huge need for entry level jobs as the field grows as well so i think there's in addition to all the new stuff there's also the mature maturation of the market that hasn't happened yet in my view i think somebody in the i'm sorry go ahead no i was gonna say we have a as you would imagine a huge developer ecosystem with multiple pathways into that and i think that's another area where people who people think you must have a degree in engineering or a degree in computer science in order to enter that field and they don't think about the non-degree people who can learn coding or don't need to learn coding to become developers we have a program called call for code and one of the things that that does is expose people to how you use tech to solve social challenges many of those are focused around sustainable development goals the big idea is people should understand that anyone can be a developer right and what developers do is to solve problems right and then from there you figure out what are the skills that you would need in order to enter a develop develop developer role being a tech professional generally is the idea of that is intimidating to folks who aren't steeped in that space right um we're really proud of this fact so i will say it we've done this what we do for almost 9 500 people in the last eight or nine years seventy percent of them did not have a tech degree of any kind seventy percent thirty percent of them didn't even have a stem degree of any kind right we're talking about english majors like me or political science or history music majors do really well in our program in apprenticeships for coding but i think your point about demystifying tech jobs specifically developer jobs it gets lumped in i work with higher ed every day every day of the week and developer computer science software engineering gets lumped in with like quantum physics all the time right they're not it's it's a totally these are hard skills you can do this if you have the right attitude you have the right aptitude and you're given the right opportunity you can do it um and i think that's fundamentally for us that's that's our operating hypothesis but we have to work i think industry has to work together as well to provide this ecosystem because it's not going to one one group is not gonna be able to do it there are 500 000 unfilled cyber jobs in the u.s today wow that's a freak 500 000 huge opportunity and and the estimates i've heard for the next 10 years is 36 million right well somebody asked a question from the audience and i think it's a really good one one of the excuses that we heard fr we've heard from the long-standing uh learn and earn models like registered apprenticeships in construction like registered apprenticeships in manufacturing two sectors that are awfully homogeneous in terms of their workforce is that the people didn't have the skills those people those women those people of color didn't have the skills to benefit from the registered apprenticeship and that's why they couldn't get in so there's a cottage industry that's developed and that's pre-apprenticeship programs that so let's talk for a minute about that what do you think is that valuable what the question very specifically was you know do the organ do you work at all with pre-apprenticeship programs and i know the answers to some of that but i mean let's talk for a second about these programs that prepare people with the skills they need to benefit from the paid position that is an apprentice well i'm going to leave it to the experts to talk about the examples but i said lydia brought a lot of data so i finally got a data point that i want to use and she brought so much data which is that i mean just underscore your point jane so of the 30 largest registered apprenticeship programs in the country right now only four are not in manufacturing or in the skilled trades and manufacturing and the skilled trades tend to be skewed towards men white men and people working in those traditional fields the unionized context etc so we have a problem with the registered apprenticeship model that i think we've got to work through and figure out ways to get to these other kinds of models so that we can get more of these workers of color more women of color in particular into these formalized learn and earn processes so that we can again help pull more people through the process allow them to get on that ladder of opportunity and allow them to be to be much more successful but the reality today of those 600 000 or so registered apprenticeships is that the vast majority of them are not targeted on who has the greatest um educational um and training skills gaps that we see in the country right now and to add to that ibm is working closely with the department of labor to get some of these new tech apprenticeships recognized in onet so there's a gap you know some of these things are legacy barriers that just require people to say oh here's a bottleneck we can fix let's fix it we're doing the we have the people we have the training let's just not have the system be the thing that snags people so we have to be mindful of all of the places where this breaks down along the way for people and think about those personas the pre-apprenticeship programs are great if they are tied to something that at the end of the day gives them training readiness for a job if it is a dead-end pre-apprenticeship program now some of your your content i've played on skills build some of your content on skills build could fit directly into a pre-apprenticeship program and it's already connected with the skills that the employer is requiring right we have two pre-apprenticeship programs actually um and i keep coming back to this what we're trying to do is empower more people to believe that they can do these jobs and i think the one of the ways that you can do that effectively is by providing easily accessible and effective free apprenticeship training pre-training training if you will to help people understand what are the fundamental logic reasoning uh technical foundational skills do you need to be successful in attack approaches i'm speaking again from a tech lens i think the model holds for any industry where work experience is necessary to be hired but for tech what we've done with a program called rev up is if somebody applies to come work for us and they're not quite there they're not quite ready we don't say hey bye see you later don't ever apply here again we say go into rev up go into this pre-apprenticeship program work on your asynchronously for the for the um for the requirements because most of these folks have jobs right and they want to work for us so they get a better job asynchronous requirements but we we have committed to providing two hours a day every day of the week for study groups for synchronous trainer interaction peer-to-peer interaction 24 7 through slack and discord for our pre-apprentices to get them as quickly as humanly possible to the point where they are hireable right and reverter accelerated program wrap is is a version of that but for folks who are in their final semester of either associate their associate's degree or their bachelor's degree helping folks understand that yeah it's not in spite of your english degree speaking from experience i'm an english major as well there we go english minor teacher it's not it's not in spite of your english degree that you can be a good developer or a good tech professional it's because of your english degree or because of your business degree or because of the skills that you've developed in uh in a work based learning pathway through skills build or whatever it doesn't have to be a traditional pathway we have to empower more people through pre-training through pre-apprenticeships to believe that they can do this right and that's what we're trying to do i think that's what lydia you guys are i've seen some of the stuff you're doing it's amazing that the work that you guys are doing so one of our audience partners has a question about internships and i'm going to assume they're talking about paid internships even though many places i worked had unpaid interns but how can employers work more closely with higher education to give that opportunity to more students i think is the gist of the question make it a little easier for higher ed to do it so they do it more we have a lot of relationships with universities around the world as you would imagine uh many of those are research relationships but we also have a team of people who focus on what we provide to hbcus and community colleges we're launching partnerships across the country with community colleges and skills built and how can they integrate the two and get closer together we and so i'm right speaking from the ibm lens we have clients around the world all of whom need skilled employees so we talk to them about do you you know how do we look at where they have openings on the ground working with a community college using skills build bringing in other training providers and making sure that we can help fill their needs some of those may be internship opportunities i'm right giving a bigger answer than just internships but i think we need to be focused and deliberate about bringing the right people around the table making sure the opportunity is there at the end of the day because what we saw for years and years were people getting trained without the job at the end of the path and maybe they were trained and got a badge or a credential or a certificate or something and they took it to an employer and the employer said i don't know who tom and jerry training program is and i it's great that you just spent 18 months doing this but this doesn't mean anything to me so we need to have that connection of making sure the programs are tied to the jobs tied to the employers right and that their support for learners along the way and helping the employers understand what do these folks actually know right right and it goes back to the credentialing question right um or credentialing versus certification however you want to frame it what we've found most success with is building and helping our folks as they go through this apprenticeship have a a legitimate and and easily consumable or actionable from the employer's perspective portfolio of skills not just what are my certifications not just what are my competencies what is the actual work product that through this apprenticeship i have created over the last three months because every single apprentice that we have goes through a capstone project in a simulated work environment with a scrum master with a project manager all these things and they have work product to show so it's a legitimate example of exactly what these folks know and we can prove it mathematically right and so we working towards not that easy it's capital intensive it's it's hard it's taken us 10 years to get to this scale blah blah blah but but helping them understand beyond just credential you know verified by a third party is important but what is the work product what is what is your day one readiness going to be like once you actually get to the job demonstrate that you can absolutely jamie could you take a second you see the question came up uh what's the difference between a certification and a credential oh take this professor marisotis now to give you the uh the the lay of the land here about so the easiest way to think about the word credentials and i think it's really important because i think we get caught up in the public dialogue about these terms and it impedes the conversation to me credential is a generic or umbrella term right so badges licenses certificates certifications degrees are all a form of a credential right so you go through some sort of formalized learning process and at the end of it you get awarded that credential now some people in higher ed bristol when they heard here degrees or credentials i'm here to tell you degrees or credentials they're one form of credential just like any other credential because the labor market says that the labor market says all of these things have value and therefore we should treat them all as credentials certifications one piece of that as compared to certificates by the way certificates are awarded through educational institutions right and they tend to be job or career specific particularly in different industry verticals certifications are are are awarded by the industry by industry associations by by groups that that are part of the industry so that that's what a certification is but we get caught up in this terminology right badges tend to be third-party mediated efforts um you know licenses are obviously licensing bodies that where in professions that where licenses are are are permitted are required my point is all of these things should count in the ecosystem of credentials we should be able to understand what you know and can do with that badge that certificate that certification that license that degree and you should be able to apply it to what comes next and i want to come back to the point about prior learning assessment because i think it's really important in higher education we have this process it's a very laborious labor intensive process called prior learning assessment in which some institutions try to assess what you know coming in the door uh to give you some credit in order to be able to to advance in the learning process the problem is the onus is on the learner not on the on the educational institution and i think that that system is wrong it is too complex too difficult and the best example of this is that too many people exit the military after four or six years they show up on a college campus and they say welcome to freshman year well that makes no sense if you understand what kind of knowledge and skills they developed in in the military again concrete knowledge and skills and those generalizable things teamwork and and and collaboration and ethics all those things that i was mentioning earlier so it's really important for us to recognize that credentials are important that all credentials should count and that we need to have a better lexicon of understanding how all of these different credentials come together by the way there's an entity called credential engine that is attempting to do this which is a platform that tries to create some connection for employers for higher ed institutions for licensing and and workforce agencies etc to all try to speak the same language when it when it comes to this work but it's it's really important that we get the language right because i think the consumers are the losers in this because they get very very uh discouraged in the marketplace when they don't understand this terminology i think the other issue with the terminology is the great thing about linkedin is it's a market where everyone can can sort of market themselves and they don't have to go through a recruiter they don't have to go through an hr office they have to go through someone else right it's a direct to market option but everyone is using ai optimized algorithms to scan for the employee the the potential hires and if the language doesn't match the job descriptions or the skills and abilities that the role that's open lists you may be missed for something that really has nothing to do with your readiness for that job and to the extent that we can start being more unified in how we talk about what people are know and are able to do and are using the same lexicon i mean this is right a big lift but this is back to one of those systemic challenges that we have it will make it easier for people who are job seekers to actually get matched with the job that they're ready to do so now somebody brought up a word that we really haven't discussed and that word is rural you know are the the opportunities that we're talking about let's take broadband out of the that for one second national disgrace that everybody doesn't have access to broadband but are these learn and earn opportunities available to people in rural areas please go ahead you have a lot more to say i'll say this this is the one upside to us having come through the last two years we have been forced to figure out how to do things virtually that before we were not even considering thinking about right how to do it and so now there are a lot more training opportunities that are available to people who are rural who have access to broadband this is it right this is not the purpose of this panel if anyone wants to hear me on a soapbox let's talk afterwards about you know broadband in america or lack of access to it but i think it is important to understand the opportunities that have come around as a result of the pandemic making sure that people did have access to work and training and to continue being able to participate or prepare for employment so there are virtual internships that are paid and virtual opportunities to do apprentice programs indeed there are um we're a great example of what you just described 100 100 of the people who we trained through these apprenticeships before covet were face-to-face um employees 100 of them 100 percent are now remote 100 of the thousands of people that we put through apprenticeships every year go through remote fully synchronous fully engaged very low very low trainer to trainee ratio all of those things i come from an online learning background so i come from an online higher ed degree completion background guess what the results are better um when you eliminate the challenge some of the challenges especially the audiences that we're trying to serve which are underrepresented groups typically people that don't have otherwise have a pathway and attack they don't have twenty thousand dollars to throw to boot camp they don't have the ability to take on 30 000 on average in debt to get a bachelor's in computer science whatever fully remote apprenticeships are not only possible they're possible at scale and they're possible with outcomes of 95 to 97 placement in careers uh at the end because i know that for fact because we're doing it let me just add to that i agree with all of that i think that's right and let's remember that most businesses hire locally so rural employers should be looking for opportunities for these learn and earn opportunities in the same way that the urban and and suburban and ex-urban employers do in the same ways you know part of the problem one of the questions that came up there's a lot of questions that have come through in the in in the chat here that we're not going to get to one of the questions that came up that i really agree with is that too much of the onus is on the learner or the learner worker and not enough on the employers or on the educational institutions i really agree with that i think i think it's a it's an essential piece of of the of the puzzle here to go back to the the point about internships an internship that doesn't pay or at a minimum absolute minimum award academic credit should be socially unacceptable in the modern era you should not be having those kind of opportunities anymore that puts too much of the burden on the learner as opposed to the beneficiaries of these learn and earn models which is the employers and society and the economy and so i think it's really important that government and the employers do a better job of coordinating their efforts to elevate these these programs creating better opportunities so that it's not the onus isn't on the learner worker to go find the internship find the co-op find the apprenticeship it should be a a pollster i keep using this phrase a pull strategy to to pull these learner workers through the system because it's our collective well-being our shared outcomes that we get from these learn and earn models that i think is really important for us to focus on and these kids should people not just kids although most of the world is a kid to me but the they shouldn't have to decide between learning or doing their homework or putting food on their table i mean it should be combined and made easier for them so i want to go back because there's another question here about traditional higher ed the traditional higher ed institutions are they should they be getting into this certification world not just degrees and are they doing it now are they partnering with with the two businesses here and jamie who do you think they're partnering with they are yes they definitely are um should i don't know i think that's up to them do they yes do we work with some of them yes we do um i think the other thing that's been interesting is higher ed has had a tougher time meeting all of their financial needs with tuition and so they are thinking of new revenue models one of the new revenue models is non-degree training offered through colleges and universities that's where some of this comes in yeah i think i think that's that's really important and in particular community colleges right community colleges have the flexibility the ability to be adaptable to be labor market responsive in real time all of those things that are really important it's not to say that we should let the four-year institutions off the hook but the reality of the of the model of community colleges is that that's what their their sort of purpose built for for this for this moment in my opinion it's why we're putting the majority of our resources at luna right now in community college efforts and in lesson baccalaureate degree strategies because we think it's really important at this moment again to create these opportunities not so that the learning ends at the certificate or the certification but so that it gets people onto that ladder of opportunity and continues to help bring them through through that system but yeah absolutely you know higher education has i think a responsibility to do a better job of recognizing people that come to them with these different kinds of of of external externally validated certifications and then be able to apply it in the learning context that they're doing and collaborate with those certification entities to build better programs for the learners to get them better working opportunities going forward i mean i know you know years ago when i worked at the u.s chamber it was the community colleges who worked closely with us to make sure people were trained up for available jobs they were willing to work with the employer community they were willing to design what a new training program looked like and figure out how to attach credits to it figure out how to make it work for say two or three employers so we would go in we employers would go in together and say okay we will all hire people who complete a program like this at this community college it is much harder at least it was then to do that at a four-year university that had a lot of other constraints um i i do think post-pandemic people are a little more flexible but community colleges where the vast majority of students who are in higher ed are starting yeah can i just say one thing about our moderator for a second here because she's uniquely qualified in this space of higher education and and and the labor market uh because of of her background and so you know quick quick story about jane right so she was secretary of higher education in new jersey senior capitol hill staffer and then she became assistant secretary of labor with the employment training administration reporting to her jane did more to try to bring the education and training worlds together than any leader i've seen in my career my career goes back to the early 80s and i think jane would agree it didn't go far enough she did remarkable work and yet there is tremendous resistance in the system this idea that education has to exist over here and training has to exist over there and that somehow these things are very separate systems and processes you know what we know for sure is that education devoid of skills-based knowledge and abilities and training that doesn't give you those generalizable skills that is really important is not going to work in this economy and so we've got to find a better way of bringing these things together as jane has tried to do throughout throughout her career in order to do that and and you really are the the most qualified person i know who's tried to do this i think it's it's extraordinary and yet we need more jane oates's out there to provide that kind of leadership well here here well thank you so much for that uh but i want to say being at working nation i get to see the me's all over the place that are putting this together and i think the applause that came to me should go out to all of you who are actually making this happen on a local level and i will put a plug in please connect with us at workignation so we can tell your story better because it's through storytelling it's through seeing i mean you guys all know this you can't envision being able to move the mountain unless you see somebody else who's moved it you know so i think what all of you are doing and the fact that so many people are in this room this room is packed and the it just shows the grit and determination of the real people doing this this work and we're so privileged right to have them here and to have them sharing their stories with us now i'm going to go back to one of their questions because jamie it goes back to what you said and we've been friends for so long but the the reality is how do we move businesses to do what you said to take the all the risk off of the poor job seeker or the student how do we move businesses to do this i'm giving you guys a second to think because the pressure's on you yeah and we're out of time so i'll go fast in terms of of my um uh approach and the the first is i think we need to create more incentives for for business to do that in other words i think we need to reward the businesses that create these opportunities whether it is through public policy or whether it is through our efforts to try to reward them through you know the ways in which you know we acknowledge the work of these employers you know uh brand reputation matters you know lydia was talking about the csr function elevating that i think is really important the second thing that i think we need to do to get businesses to engage more in this is for them to understand that at the end of the day the bottom line improves for them as companies so we've done quickly research at lumina foundation on the investment of employers in education and training programs not what are the outcomes for the employees but what's the outcome for the companies and what we learned through these very detailed studies that we've done is that employers literally improve their bottom line because productivity goes up employee recruitment costs go down and at the end of the day they literally make more money by investing in employee education and training so to me creating greater visibility for that and encouraging more employers to invest in this is hugely important my short answer is specifically around apprenticeships and skills build we work with our client partners on learning how to do it the way we do it some are interested some may do it but the start is how did ibm do it and we can show them how we did it and then they can figure out whether they can do it and we hope a bunch of them will absolutely i think to jamie's point we are proof positive that's what we do we provide a way for our clients these adi-ish companies large companies organizations to do exactly that we provide an an ecosystem a burgeoning ecosystem and that allows or or maybe encourages or or or maybe even a harder word industry to invest in talent and the outcomes are exactly what jamie said we see it we have a 90 retention rate with our clients by the way we're less expensive than doing it than doing it internally because we've managed to create this model ibm i'm sure is the same way you've got we see the return on investment almost immediately in terms of when you invest in talent well we are out of time i can't thank you enough for joining us thank you south by southwest edu did i exaggerate it's the best panel ever [Applause] [Music]