Joe Fuller: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. This episode is one of the series of special dispatches on the sweeping effects of Covid-19 on our economy, society, and the future of work. In addition to our regular podcast episodes, we will be bringing you interviews with business leaders, policy makers, and leading scholars on the coronavirus.

School administrators at all levels are nervously eyeing the calendar as we near the start of the 2020–2021 academic year with the coronavirus pandemic unabated. Todd Oldham is the Vice President of Economic Development, Workforce and Career Technical Education, at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York. For the last decade, Todd has overseen efforts that have led the Aspen Institute to recognize Monroe as one of the top six community colleges in the US in terms of workforce development practices. Todd joins me to discuss how community colleges are navigating the Covid-19 pandemic and the future of technical education in a post-Covid world. Todd, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Todd Oldham: Great to be here. Thank you.

Fuller: Todd, those of us who study higher ed and the community college system are very familiar with Monroe Community College, which has been a real standard bearer for working with local economic development agencies and pioneering programs that help your students fit with the jobs that are actually in demand in your area. But could you just give us a little bit of the background of the community college and how you got involved?

Oldham: Sure. Well, my involvement with MCC, as we refer to it, goes back to about 2011, when our president at the time, Dr. Kress, had decided to start a new division that was exclusively focused on workforce development. So she put that concept together, and they decided to create a VP-level position that would basically lead it and build it out over time. And I was fortunate enough to be appointed to that position and have been there working since.

Fuller: So what was the motivation for her doing that? And tell us a little bit about Rochester, itself. It was the iconic corporate town for a long time. But, of course, most of those sites are closed, and those corporate headquarters, if they still exist, are vastly reduced in size.

Oldham: Well, so basically, the division’s purpose was really to address a lot of what you mentioned—the transformation that has happened in the economy. So what its focus has been is to take the assets of the college that are more, let’s say, purposely workforce focused—either because of things like grants development, which can have an economic development impact, or whether it’s noncredit industry training, customized training, or career and technical education, so mostly applied-science degrees and such that support the economy—and really to have those managed under a more common strategy and understanding the applied-economic impact to supporting the residents, with upskilling opportunities into new areas that are emerging in the economy. But also to support the business development of our economic developers, who are trying to attract business to the regions. So they have been able to make sure that we have the workforce that we need. So that, I would say, for the work we do has been probably the biggest transformation.

Fuller: Todd, for the last several years, there’ve been a lot of articles about the weakening demographics for college-aged students—how there’s going to be a big enrollment drop—and that’s being exacerbated, of course, now by Covid-19, where a lot of data suggests that people are deferring or just outright canceling plans for higher education. What are you seeing on the ground in Rochester, and how’s Monroe navigating these uncertain times?

Oldham: Well, enrollment, you are correct. Demographically, the Northeast, as we know, has been kind of experiencing declines for the most part—not in every instance, but our school has experienced a year-over-year decline. So Covid certainly doesn’t help, because of the disruption and things shifting to online, and then some students not wanting to do that, et cetera. So we’re still actually a little unclear on what the effect on enrollment’s going to be for Covid. I don’t think we will know, really, until we get closer into our fall time frame, but it definitely has impacted it. In terms of the shifting demographics—and I think the question is how you stay relevant to the market, to the community college market, in this case—one of the ways that we’re looking at doing that is really showing the value of the community college. If you have a ... which is happening right now, we’re seeing this. We have students that are returning or coming to us in place of spending really premium dollars on great institutions, but that are charging a premium, and they’re going to be online. For some students—that, plus potentially a perceived risk of Covid, itself, has students and their parents wanting those students to stay closer to home, if you will. And so MCC, as being one of the larger schools of the community colleges within the SUNY system, it presents a really great value for a student that’s not looking necessarily at parents paying a premium. But beyond that, I would say, in terms of the demographic shifts, we really have to look harder at how we present the value that the community college represents. It’s much less expensive. And a school like MCC, we’re quite comprehensive. We have very strong student services, and we have athletics and things like that. So if you do an actual cost analysis, depending on what your goals are—and we do a better job of communicating that, I think—as a system in the country, community colleges offer a really strong value, particularly when you get into the technical education, which is largely what I focus on in the college, and the careers that are available through those and the wages that can come with those. It’s a story that needs to be told more strongly and needs to be told more pervasively when students and parents are actually considering a college path.

Fuller: Todd, during your tenure at MCC, the college has really emerged as a leader in technical education, and specifically in how community colleges engage the local business community, understands what’s going on in the local business community, so that it can ensure that its graduates are studying topics that are relevant to local employers, and for which there’s a clear line of sight from success in your program to employment and a good-paying job. How did that whole system get on track? What did you do? And what’s the secret sauce that makes it work so well for you?

Oldham: Well, really, almost immediately upon turning the switch on for the division’s existence, it really made it a point that we wanted to have a couple of things that would be pillars of our approach. One of them was that we would not work through intermediaries unless we had to. But for the most part, we didn’t want to work through intermediaries for getting information about what was happening in our local community. We wanted to have, really, what we call a business-to-business approach, or a direct-sales model, where we were bringing people whose main and only job was to, on a day-to-day basis, liaise with businesses. We also pulled in and formed a marketing group, a communications group, which is somewhat unusual for our type of division. But that’s been very important so that we can present our message in a business-informed way. And that’s how businesses are accustomed to being communicated with. Obviously, they’re being prospected by other industry entities. And so we wanted to be able to communicate with them on their terms and how they’re used to, rather than having them shift over to a higher-ed thinking. And then I would say the other thing, if there were three pillars, that one of them was the data, itself. It’s, where are the gaps? Where are the needs? Obviously, if you’re out talking regularly to a client base, then you’re getting information that way. But we also wanted to have a bigger picture, a larger sample size, as you might say. And so to do that, we started very early on beginning to learn about how we can measure—first, map—our programs to the occupations that businesses are wanting to hire. So we had that crosswalk determined. And we did that locally, not relying on just standard maps, but creating our own. And then moving more toward just, ongoing, what skills are in demand? What are the occupational groups that are most relevant to us? And how are they growing or not growing? What’s the turnover rate? How are they paying? And then, ultimately for us, it eventually got to tracking our graduates via relationships that we put in place with the Department of Labor so we can see, are our students getting wage progression? Are the companies responding to the folks we’re training with the behavior that they tell us they’ll do?

Fuller: It really almost sounds, Todd, like you approached it as a business person, solving a supply-and-demand problem, as opposed to as someone working for a school trying to solve a placement problem.

Oldham: That’s very true. I wouldn’t say we’re a business. In fact, we have this conversation a lot with the team. And I’ll say, we’re not a business, but we are an entity that uses ... trying to be business informed. And so we try to exist outside of—and there’s no disrespect meant to the institution—but outside of the bureaucracy of the institution so that we can be more relevant to that market. We really see ourselves as a market-based entity. And we also very much put on an applied-economics hat in understanding the value we offer in terms of the education, itself. We’re actually majoring in supply and demand relative to supply—defined as “what’s being created through the public workforce system”—versus a demand for those jobs that those programs are creating and the suppliers are mapping to. And so that is very strongly, I think, a fair statement about what we’ve tried to base our work on.

Fuller: Well, you’re also an unusual institution, since you actually publish a local labor-market analysis pretty regularly.

Oldham: We have. We have done that for off and on—different types of analyses. We’ve started doing, basically, regional skills gaps through our business journal and then the Center for Government Research, which is housed in a well-known research group that goes back, actually, to George Eastman days. We partnered with them, and we started doing that and really trying to understand where these persistently difficult-to-fill positions are across different sectors. And then we actually moved to a supply-and-demand analysis, which we did as a large flat file, like a 200-page book that looked at four or five key areas that we were most relevant to. And then looking at that framework of supply and demand and skill sets needed, and then we morphed that into being an evergreen report online. And then, most recently, we started doing a skills-cluster analysis, because one of the emergent capabilities—with so many of each of the job market being online—is, if those different systems can analyze those job postings and what’s in them, in order to then derive information that’s going on, it’s a little bit more real time than what you’d get through traditional government-source data. The result of that is, we can now start looking at what is the skills-based economy locally asking for, independent of a college credential, and those that are most associated with wages that are premium. Again, independent of the credential, where that’s possible. We believe that’s really the future of a lot of workforce development—which is, how do we service increasingly a skills-based economy, especially in the community college labor market, rather than necessarily a credential-based economy for individuals? And I think that’s where we’re going to see a lot of work done in the next, let’s say, three to five years. It’s going to be, really, opening up in a way that we haven’t seen probably within higher education, at least not in the two-year space.

Fuller: Well, that’s certainly consistent, Todd, with our research here at the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School. It really does seem that employers are beginning to step back from that degree requirement and asking what jobs actually require a degree and are, in fact, looking for students or graduates with a very specific skills base they’ve cultivated, irrespective of what comes along with the degree. What are you seeing in terms of the skills that have been emerging in the last several years in Rochester? We certainly hear a lot about increased advent—not just of digital skills—but also increasing requirements for the broad category of social skills: things like spontaneous written and oral communication, the ability to engage somebody in a negotiation, is the term of art, but it’s really having empathy for the other person and being able to articulate your position well. Things like that.

Oldham: The themes that we see—and this is not entirely new to us because we were experiencing with the work that we’ve been doing for the last several years—is really, integration is a big piece. It’s an interdisciplinary, what we would consider interdisciplinary, given the way that we have historically taught programs. Where we’re seeing in technical—and this was focused, I should say, on technical roles, technician workforce, that was our focus—but increasing levels of connectivity due to the Internet of Things [IoT]. But in this case, particularly, the Industrial Internet of Things [IIoT], which is essentially everything’s connected, if listeners haven’t heard that term. It’s the reality that all devices that we have—from wearable devices to, in the business environment, various types of equipment that’s connected wirelessly, or even connected real with a wire. It doesn’t really matter, they’re all connecting and talking. And so there’s all these transactions happening. And that has really affected what we see as the workplace. We see a lot more data, data acumen, because all of those transactions are creating a data stream and a need for real-time analytics to some level—it’s different for different roles—but that’s something that is new for us. And you mentioned soft skills. And so this is something ... I know in my career, I’ve been in lots of focus groups in different parts of the country and workforce roles, and you always hear soft skills come up. It’s like something that you can almost guarantee. Not surprisingly in this study, it came up very strong. But the definition of those soft skills is—you allude to—there’s a digital aspect to it now, a digital literacy, which people interpret differently. It could be just fundamentally able to work in a computer environment, maybe just using a laptop or a computer. But it goes beyond that, really, I think in the context of the work environment. It’s really, again, understanding how to use that data, that problem solving. Troubleshooting comes up a lot. The more practical aspects of teamwork and being able to work virtually, or work on ad hoc teams, but also be able to work independently is a modern skill set, whether you want to call that “soft skills” or not. And then a couple other things: cybersecurity, the reality, because everything’s so connected, how do you protect that information? What are good protocols since you have the ability, that’s a skill set, increasingly. And cloud computing. And then also coding and programming. Those were the main things we saw. And I think that’s consistent with work that we’ve done on ongoing basis, where companies are asking us to train employees or to create an employee that they don’t have access to right now. And much of the conversation we usually center on, can we have somebody that will show up on time? Can we have somebody ... which they’ll determine as another type of soft skill, but that’s really more of a basic understanding of the world of work. And in some realities, there are audiences that could benefit from these pathways, that we can’t assume that those basic understandings of the world of work exist. And so that has to be addressed as well in curriculum as we go forward.

Fuller: Certainly our data suggests that the absence of soft skills is a much more frequent cause of someone’s career stalling or someone with a good technical background, hard-skilled background, from getting on a pathway to economic independence. “Soft skills,” of course, being defined as things like, everything from attention to detail, to understanding workplace etiquette, to communications effectiveness—sometimes also called, of course, “power skills” or “professional skills.” Todd, talk to us a little bit about lifelong learning. It’s a phrase that gets thrown around very, very casually by people in very pious comments: “Oh, we all need to be lifelong learners.” Of course, our education infrastructure isn’t particularly well set up to support adult learners who already are working full or part time, or have significant family obligations. And, of course, a lot of people are very ambivalent about their own education backgrounds. Or the thought that they’re going to go back to school isn’t one that causes them to have a spring in their step. It actually causes them some consternation.

Oldham: One of the things that we see for the type of work that we do—I think it goes back to the skills-based economy that you had mentioned. It’s very dynamic, and things are changing. And if you look at things like Industry 4.0 and these smart technologies that are really quite transformative and happening at a faster pace, folks have to retrain. It’s kind of a mindset. It’s not like you get a bachelor’s and then you’re set for the rest of your career. It’s kind of an ongoing upskilling. And so what we really need is to transform how individuals access education formally at institutions of higher learning. And I think what you’re seeing with that is the concept of stackable credentials. Obviously, online is a huge modality there, because folks can take it that are working and have families, et cetera. But we really see that micro-credential, that stackable certificate, as being the way to go. We’re actually creating a new training center that’s built entirely around having the education that happens there in a technical format happening in these kinds of stackable certificates, so that individuals can come in and then they can get out and go back to their employer. Or if they’re being retrained for that occupation—it’s below what we normally would measure—that we can do that quickly for the individual and get them placed into a job that’s needed to be filled by an employer. And so it’s a more responsive and really just a more aligned way of supporting the local market by doing these types of approaches.

Fuller: So it sounds like you’re applying the exact same logic you’ve applied to young people about to enter the workforce coming out of MCC to those stackable credentials that people in the middle of their careers may be wanting to gain, to either have high confidence that they’re going to be able to stay up to date and keep their job or to qualify for a better job or for advancement.

Oldham: Absolutely. I mean, I really believe that when you’re talking about moving more toward these more market-aligned sequences, one of the pieces is with this is not just how we teach, but it’s also the assumption we’re beginning to make, because we now are overseeing the career-services function of the college. We, in the near future, want to assume when somebody comes to us, the assumption is that you want us to retrain you or to train you—it might not be retraining, it might be upskilling you—but if you’re not already employed, then we’re assuming you want us to link you to an opportunity related to that training in the market. And so that’s really the kind of accountability, and the proof is in the pudding. If we are a market-driven entity, then we should be able to show that kind of longitudinal win for the individual.

Fuller: Given Monroe’s unusually good performance in engaging with employers, what are the three things you’d say to other colleagues in the community college system of the United States about what it takes to be a success in engaging employers, either for their brand new young people who are graduating from their programs or for those mid-career people trying to upskill to stay market-relevant.

Oldham: If you’re talking about the business community, it’s really having a systematic way—and I think systematic as the key or the operative word there—and that phrase is a systematic way of engaging businesses so that, on an ongoing basis, there’s a dialogue that’s continuously happening. You can do surveys, you can do targeted conversations or questions and polling, and all kinds of things that are actually quite simple to do, which you can derive quite a bit of information about your local market. There’s clearly, you can utilize your industry associations, which are always great, your chambers, your economic development councils. And as far as the secondary education piece, how are we understanding the local school districts that we’re working with and the interests of those students that are coming up into high school and where we can try to create early college, high school opportunities with either the dual-enrollment type models. And that differs in different states or concurrent-enrollment models, where we can try to get those students exposed to the post-secondary environments, technical environments—we’re talking about technicians and other areas—sooner than later. And all of these models exist. It’s, I think, how you thread them together into a strategy, where they’re not operating completely separate at the institution, but they’re operating where they’re informed by this common strategy. And I think that may be one thing that I think we’ve done rather consistently.

Fuller: So, Todd, let’s reverse that. If you were talking to an employer about what it takes to get good service from a community college and to get the type of talent you’re looking for from that institution, what would you tell them to do?

Oldham: Well, first, I would really encourage them to get in contact with the community college—and in particular … it depends on the college, but if there’s a workforce development unit—most colleges, so the community colleges have workforce or a continuing-education area—that’s where you’d probably want to begin discussions. And to the extent that you can have your need defined as well as you can, having job competencies or the scope of labor laid out—if you have your job description and what you’re looking for—if that can be documented, that helps so much when we’re dialoguing with companies. We actually request that, because it helps us understand what specifically are the skill sets that make up this particular title, because titles mean different things to different companies. But if you can get down to the skill sets, I think it makes it much more efficient for the school to start to understand—can they meet your need? Or do they have it internally? Or will they need to then bring some external resources in to, ultimately, be able to provide you the support? And I would say the other thing—this is increasingly something that I’ve seen and really believe is going to be necessary to deal with some of the areas where we have deficits of skilled workers—is how can the company help the college in terms of recruiting the individuals? We’ve had really good success on our end with learn-and-earn models, where the company will actually hire the individual that meets … they may not have the skill set, but the candidate is acceptable in other ways. And if they can even make a minimum wage while they’re going through—these are fast-track trends we’re talking about—then that gives a lot more stability to the individual. It helps keep retention of that person in the program. And then, ultimately, when they complete, then they would get an adjustment in their wage to the credentialed wage or the skills-based wage because they’ve been upskilled. But that’s a model that has really been powerful for us. But I think having businesses, if they can, go a little extra step than just wait for the college to produce the worker you need, how can they support the college in overcoming some of the real obstacles that they face in doing this type of work, which increasingly is ... there’s a lot of challenges they run into, and businesses can help solve that. One of the ways you see this happening, and you see a lot of populated with apprenticeship programs, and one of the real benefits of an apprenticeship program is that the instructional responsibility is being divided up between the formal education institution and the company’s on-the-job training. And so that allows that model to have two entities that are more responsible for that production of that worker than just the school, itself. And I think, not that we have to do apprenticeships for everything—I don’t actually believe that—but I believe that that element within the apprenticeship model is what we’ve also seen replicated in other models like I just explained, with learn-and-earn and other structures, where we can get that kind of dynamic. And that’s, I think those are a position that businesses can take that would really help the institution.

Fuller: Todd, we’re all familiar with the research that indicates that having surround services for students really positively affects outcomes. How’s Covid affected that, and what have you done to respond?

Oldham: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, so the question of supports, I mean, so that’s something that increasingly community colleges, even without Covid happening, we have issues of, because increasingly the demographic that we serve is … and the population we have to provide, there’s a great need among students for a variety of needs. Food insecurity. There has been a lot of work done in the last couple of years on really showing the amount of food insecurity that’s within higher-education environments among students and the negative effects that has on their ability to learn. So at our school, we’ve established a food pantry that students can come into and grab the food that they need so that they cannot be worried about where their next meal is coming from, but they actually can be focused on their studies. If we’re talking about adult populations, childcare is always a challenge. And so that can become a very big issue. And we’ve also looked at the transportation difficulty. If you’re in rural environments, transportation to the college. Or even in urban environments, we have transportation issues, particularly with a bus line. It’s kind of difficult, the way you have to ride it, it’s going to take quite a long time to get to your destination depending on how those routes go. So those are things that we do have many different types of partnerships, and also direct supports from the college to try to address those. It could be as simple as providing grocery cards to individuals that are in programs. As I mentioned earlier, food pantries, we have at the college. Because of Covid, our foundation was able to support us, and we were able to give laptops out to students that needed those in order to shift into the online format. Mental health is an issue, clearly, with Covid for our populations. So these are all things that we’re dealing with, in addition to the education, itself. And that’s certainly not specific to MCC. It’s the way, those are big issues that are being dealt with all over the country in different types of institutions.

Fuller: Todd, as we look at what the impact of Covid on companies and work practices, obviously there’s been a huge pivot to remote work and reliance on disperse teams. Is that going to work in Rochester’s advantage?

Oldham: You know, that’s a really, it’s a very good question. It’s kind of, I think, hard to say. I think in the end, it’s going to be come down to, as far as the training goes, face-to-face is still going to be necessary. We really focus on skills-based, pretty heavily skills-based programs. So those are going to still, we believe, need to be done. If they’re done right, there’s going to be some elements of them done face to face. So that’s definitely going to happen. There’s only so much that you can do online. Only so much you can do with simulation and things of that nature. It does definitely play a role, and it will play more of a role in the future for certain than we did prior to Covid. But the face-to-face reality is still going to be there. I mean, we still have, we have a lot of training projects that were fairly large, that had been hiatused temporarily, while those organizations adjusted, just as we are, to this more restricted reality with PPE and other things. But presently, we see that service is being needed. It’s just going to probably be, in the shorter term, it’s going to look a little different than it did prior for us in March, when we had to go into this very remote reality.

Fuller: Todd, well thanks for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast and telling us about everything Monroe Community College has done to restore some life to the economy of Rochester.

Oldham: Thank you for the opportunity.

Fuller: Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work and for more information on the coronaviruses’s impact, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.