Joe Fuller: San Antonio not-for-profit Project Quest is nearing its third decade as an engine of upward mobility. Part of a grassroots response to factory and military base closings, the organization has evolved into a successful skills-based training and job placement operation. Funded by the city and private partners, it manages an ecosystem that includes community colleges, employers, and low-wage, low-skilled workers. Project Quest’s investment in participants has paid off in improved job prospects and earnings. The program’s “wraparound” support services for participants and its rigorous metrics and tracking have won praise from a range of observers and financial backing from the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. Project Quest director, former USAA executive David Zammiello, joins me to discuss the organization's history and the challenges posed by Covid-19. The organization has shown a rare willingness to reevaluate its operations and adapt its practices over time. Its recent investment in outreach, technology, and program content prepared Project Quest to play a major role in San Antonio’s federally funded Covid-response plan to retrain 15,000 unemployed workers. David, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

David Zammiello: Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here.

Fuller: David, I think a lot of people who have worked in the skills development area and have studied public-private partnerships are aware of Project Quest. It's one of the most established and historically successful programs in the U.S. in terms of skills development, but could you just give our listeners a bit of a history about Project Quest and everything from your mission to how you're funding model works and your engagement with employers in the city?

Zammiello: Sure. Project Quest has been serving the San Antonio area for the last 28 years. We're a nonprofit organization that was started by an organization called Citizens Organized for Public Service in the San Antonio area, which is referred to as COPS/Metro. If you go back in time and look at the early nineties, San Antonio was going through a transition about workforce changes where middle-skill jobs were being challenged because we had the [Congressional] Base Realignment and Closure Committee, there was a Levi Strauss manufacturing plant they were closing down. You had many people that were at risk of job loss because they didn't have the skills for—that time, in the early nineties—the jobs of the future. And as a result of a lot of community organization and discussion COPS/Metro approached the city of San Antonio and really brought this issue to the forefront. There was not a structured workforce development program in the city. And out of those discussions in the early 90s between the city of San Antonio—at that time, Judge [Nelson] Wolff was the head of the city—COPS/Metro, and other business organizers, Project Quest was created to fill that void, to provide access for training for middle-skill jobs. And the first graduate for Project Quest was actually in the early 90s. And since that point in time for the last 28 years, the City of San Antonio has been a foundational funder for Project Quest. And we have served this community to help provide access to training programs and education programs for people that really represent the underserved community, unemployed, under-skilled, and have had a long track record of success because of that forged relationship and partnership between our city and COPS/Metro. And that program that we're talking about really does provide individuals who are interested and have the desire access to skills through the community college system and through other training partners. In that structure Project Quest has served as a workforce intermediary to bring together individuals in need of upskilling and reskilling, training institutions that offer those skill transition opportunities, and employers who have those in-demand wage jobs that help individuals actually make that transition from being in a situation of poverty to getting into a middle-skill job to be able to take care of their families.

Fuller: David, let me dig in on a couple of details. First of all, the city itself is part of your annual funding. It's not all just employers or grants from people like foundations.

Zammiello: Correct. Actually, the way I like to refer to them as the City of San Antonio provides the foundational funding, meaning that every year we're going through an exercise with the city to represent our outcomes to the City of San Antonio. And they make a funding decision about to provide public dollars as part of the budget process to fund Project Quest. And that creates the base layer of dollars to stand the Project Quest operations up. Then on top of that, we also have a similar relationship with the county and other public dollars and that's the foundational funding. Then on top of that, we work with the state and we're a grant-based organization. We layer other private and public dollars on top of that. Quest really is a layered funding organization, but the foundational pieces of that really resign with the City of San Antonio. And I do think that there's a unique aspect to that and the city has been doing that from day one for the last 28 years.

Fuller: And you mentioned community colleges and other educational resources. Is Project Quest marketing their offers to employers, or is it the opposite flow where you're working with whatever educational resource, whether it is a community college, the K through 12 system, other training resources at state or county level to meet up with what the employers want?

Zammiello: We start, Joe, with the employer demand. We focus on the in-demand occupations, because at the end of the day through the Project Quest experience our role is to put people into positions where they can grow a career and they can take care of their families. If you think about it from that starting point Quest is oriented to looking at the employers and then working backwards through that process. And we do have a very strong partnership and have had a longstanding partnership with the community college system here in San Antonio. The predominant amount of training that takes place, where our participants are getting support is through the community college system. And then we have a very robust outreach program. We're in the communities creating awareness about our services and our program for individuals that are looking for that opportunity to change their station in life. And once we bring them into the program, we'll match them to the right training opportunity based on where their skillsets are and where their skillsets will take them, but looking at the job market first and foremost, and we focus very heavily in the healthcare, in positions and information technology, and in the trades, but it's an employer driven model so to speak—looking at those in demand occupations first, then working back across the spectrum of the community to understand where those individuals have those needs may reside and then what their interests are. We assess them and match them and put them into a pathway towards that type of employment.

Fuller: Well, regular listeners to this podcast or people who've read our research from the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School will not be surprised to hear that all of that is music to my ears and our ears, that we think that that type of engagement and dialogue and reciprocal commitment with employers is absolutely essential to build a success. Let's talk about your success though, because you talked about measuring outcomes. And one thing we're all about here at our project is getting metrics, having them be visible, seeing opportunities for improvement. Can you share with us some of the metrics you track and what are those that you’re most proud of and most indicative of Project Quest's impact?

Zammiello: We certainly manage a talent pipeline, from intake to assessment, through training, and as I said, up to employment. But the key metric—and this is something that I've really learned in my three years with the organization—is, does an individual persist through their training experience and do they ultimately end up in a job where they can take care of the families? We're very proud of one key metric that is 90 percent of our participants who actually get into our program will complete their respective training experience, whatever that may be. And then 90 percent of those individuals that complete actually get placed in a family-sustaining wage job. And the other key metric around that is changing wages. One is the completion rate and job placement rates and the other is the change in wages or status. And we're very proud of the fact that over the last recent years that our target is at least 200- to 250 percent change in wages as our benchmark in our role. When someone completes the program and just in rough numbers, if you thought about somebody on a pre-Quest experienced making $12,000 or $13,000 a year, and maybe having some social service benefits, according to that, at the back end of that, when they've completed their in the job will pay them $42,000, $43,000, $44,000, and they can now start to take care of their families. Everything else is interesting and we want to manage it effectively, but at the end of the day, that is the standards we hold ourselves to. And I think from my experience looking at other workforce development entities, I'm not sure that, that's a common point of view, but it's the one that we hold ourselves to in terms of how we define success.

Fuller: Well, that's a great lesson and I unfortunately can confirm that a lot of training resources, skills development resources, whether they're a partnership like yours, whether they're philanthropic, really often focus on things like matriculation rates—certainly educators do—often the composition of enrollees by gender ethnic background, racial background. And very often some very hardworking well-run and certainly extraordinarily well-meaning organizations start getting quieter when you start talking about placement and, more importantly, start getting quieter when you start talking about level of wage, placement in actual field of study, and then the duration of employment that follows. The initial placement gets tracked, but what happens thereafter goes a little dark on you. You mentioned that you've only been with the organization for three years. I know you were previously with one of San Antonio's premier employers, and one of the, I think, premier companies in the US, in USAA. Could you tell us a little bit about what that transition was like and maybe what your impressions were of Project Quest as a local executive, and then as you got in the dialogue with them, and then how has your understanding of Project Quest and its impact deepened and changed now that you've been in the role?

Zammiello: That was a very interesting transition. In one respect, I spent 32 and a half years with USAA, was in various roles in the human resources side on information technology side and left the organization as a senior executive at the end of 2016, with the idea that some of the skills that I had acquired, I thought could be applied in a way to maybe better serve the community. Interestingly enough, I had not heard about Project Quest, having been in the San Antonio community for over 50 years, but once I was introduced to their mission and met individuals of their board, it was very compelling that it was a great opportunity to possibly step in and add some value to already a fabulous mission. But what I really didn’t appreciate was that when you come from a fortune 100 company that has the status and reputation of USAA and the resources to serve the military members and you come to a nonprofit, it's a completely different environment. The first six months or nine months, was strictly a learning curve just to figure out when you are in situations where you’ve got true resource constraints, and you're dealing with the dynamic nature of the political environment and the academic environment, and have an organization that has been stood up by the grassroots community, it's a very different dynamic. But what really impressed me was the people that are associated with programs like Project Quest. The staff and their dedication was amazing. Our board of directors and their commitment to service was just very, very inspiring. And then the sense of community and working through that, when you're working in a large corporate setting, sometimes you don't get that grassroots, frontline experience and that was the biggest transition for me. And it's really the unseen challenges and recognizing that you're always going to be resource constrained. You're not going to have enough time. You're not going to be able to deal with all the different stakeholders in real time. It's really a full-time, seven day a week, job that I didn't know going into it, it was going to have that level of intensity for it, but at the same time, on the other side of it, the return, if you get the return on the investment, the experience that I've had working with some fantastic people in the community, it's been a great, rewarding experience to be able to translate what I learned in my corporate life in a great company like USAA apply that in this community setting has had a very strong reward value to a very motivating and really just appreciate a lot of the nonprofit community like I didn't really understand before and how important the nonprofit community is to communities like San Antonio and the value they bring.

Fuller: Well, it doesn't sound entirely a relaxing semi-retirement, but it sounds like a very fulfilling one. We have a lot of listeners here, obviously care about all elements of workforce, whether it's skills development, economic empowerment, care economics and gender issues, how technology is changing the nature of work. And I can imagine many of them have in their minds eye—the executives who listen—sometime in their future making the type of transition you made. Are there two or three just quick postulates or commandments, David, that you would share off the top of your head that would help them if they make that transition, make it a little bit more smoothly?

Zammiello: For me, it was very important to take the skills that I acquired at USAA and apply them in a certain setting, so I wasn't actually starting over. For me it was really how do you want to serve, have a plan, talk to a lot of people, ask a lot of questions, learn about the community, and then give yourself time to just understand where you can best apply what you've acquired in your professional life that you want to then apply in this second phase of your career. I would ask anyone who's listening to be very intentional and purposeful, give it some thought, educate yourself, have a plan, talk to people, and then step into it very carefully with eyes wide open.

Fuller: One of the things you mentioned about the transitions, the need to manage all sorts of different constituencies. You've got educators, employers, public sector, administrators, as well as elected officials. Really, it's a buzz word, but you're really describing a very complex ecosystem there. What are the challenges in aligning all of those institutional forces, as well as community leaders and members of the community, that all have a shared commitment to a rather high-level outcome—more people in work that has household-sustaining economics and dignity associated with it. But when you start getting into the more details they often have, if not conflicting interests, different interests. How do you harmonize that? What are the challenges there?

Zammiello: I'll tell you, Joe, that was—you're talking about right now—the biggest number one eye-opening experience for me stepping into the role—really understanding the landscape of all these different stakeholders and then really trying to figure out where does Project Quest fit in the eyes of those stakeholders at that given point in time. And for me, those first six to nine months, it was strictly a listening tour. It is more about relationships in the sense of exchanging information and keeping front and center what your mission is and how your organization's functioning and the strength of those partnerships. And we actually created an office in Project Quest called Community Partnerships to focus on that outward view of managing those relationships. I learned that we probably were not as effective at telling our story from a fact-based data-driven point of view. And we really created a way to present the Project Quest mission using empirical data, facts, and those compelling stories in investing a lot of time with other partners and ecosystem to bring them up to speed. I'll give you a perfect example just as a matter of the point. We really—as I talk about the foundational funding with the city of San Antonio—our city council, our mayor plays a critical role in how Quest is funded and the support that we get. And, and I felt that we could have done a better job of educating our city council members. We spent several months just spending one-on-one time with all of our city council members, walking them through the mission, the vision, how Quest operates, how it's serving the constituents of their particular council districts, to help them appreciate when they were making decisions in funding Quest, what were they actually doing? You have to inform and educate, and then be willing to talk about how your mission supports other missions because I think in the nonprofit sector or with the educational institutions there's a lot of opportunity to partner for the collective good. In the last three years Project Quest has been able to create new partnerships and bring our resources to bear with other organizations for the greater good and that's a constant.

Fuller: So David, we're talking in the late September 2020, and obviously the event of, maybe of our lifetime and certainly of the last few years, it's distorted what's going on, on labor markets, thrown a lot of the types of populations you serve into very adverse circumstances, is the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. How has that affected everything from your participants' lives to what you're trying to do to sustain your record of taking low income people and equipping them for a sustainable, decent-paying job in the future?

Zammiello: Needless to say, as you commented it's the challenge of a lifetime, and it has been a remarkable challenge over the last six months in particular. And so there was a lot of work that was done in that late February, early March timeframe to outfit ourselves with the resources so we can stay relevant to our participants. And that was really the first point to manage. And that was the biggest challenge. So as we're converting and figuring out how to operate virtually, we had about, at that time about 500 or so participants that were engaged in various training programs that were being converted to a virtual online learning. So, all this was happening in a very dynamic fashion over the last six months. So that was step one, was just being able to pivot and bring our ability to whether it's operating on the phone or through social media platforms to remain engaged with our participants. Their challenges were considerable. As I said, being in that case, staying at home, staying home with their families, maybe not having access to the complete array of technology themselves. Having to go strictly to an online learning. And the individuals that we're supporting, they also have the other social challenges around that piece of it. So we were highly committed to having high touch-points with our participants through that period. And we stayed with them through that whole summer of making sure they stayed on task with their training, or if they needed support for things like possibly paying rent or needing some support for food and things like that, where we could offer those resources. We certainly did so, so they could sustain their programs, but probably more importantly, was our coaches just being that voice for them to be there, to help them hold on in that period of uncertainty. And our coaches did a fantastic job. Now that we're on the other side of this initial phase and looking at what's longer term force recovery efforts going to be, we're partnering with the city and the county to then figure out how does Project Quest contribute its resources to a longer term workforce recovery effort as we sit here in September.

Fuller: Certainly a constant that we've seen across different types of programs, is having regular elements of human interaction, having that coach and cheerleader and mentor who's giving people that needed encouragement, but also helping them overcome real bottlenecks that might not occur even to people as they're designing programs, whether it's access to WiFi or transport, or last-minute childcare resources, things like that. David, let's spend a little more time talking about wraparound services. Some people describe them as kind of the secret sauce to make these programs work by really enabling learners to make the most of the opportunity. But I'm always surprised it's characterized as a secret. Talk about Project Quest’s wraparound services, and your impressions of them and the impact they have since you've come over from the private sector.

Zammiello: It really kind of fits in five different dimensions. And that first dimension is really about assessment and understanding the individual. Are they in a situation where they can actually take on a training opportunity? So, I look at it like mass customization in a way that you're really understanding who this person is, why they're coming to a program like Project Quest and what they want to get out of it. And that takes a very detailed amount of information, getting to know the person. The second part of the wraparound services is complete advising, and don't confuse this with academic advising. We certainly have an academic advising component to it, but it's also then really talking about career coaching of what career paths are available, based on some form of the assessment. What's the right fit for the individual and what they're trying to accomplish professionally? So you think about the whole coaching and advising assessment to it. Then you're really talking about them getting into the technical training. And what we do that goes along with that is, we refer to them as, "vision, initiative, and perseverance sessions—VIP." They are the heart of our wraparound services model. We were working with participants to help build out their soft skills, organizational skills, stress management, communication, job readiness, how do you get ready for a job, if you need to have any kind of other coaching support? So, you're not just getting the technical training, but you're also getting the soft skills training to make you job-ready. And then there is the financial support. So paying for the tuition, paying for the books, paying for support services, if you need your rent paid for, if you need your groceries covered, to make sure you can stay on track. And then the last piece of that is helping you develop your resume, prepare for the job interview, advocate for you, match you with employers, and see that you actually have the opportunity to interview and take the job. And then we'll track you for 18 months after that to make sure you persist in the job. That version of wraparound services is a very intense, intentional intervention that a lot of organizations, I don't think, are willing to put that kind of sweat equity into the individuals. But to me, and what I've learned in the three years, that's what differentiates our outcomes. It isn't just writing a check and funding an individual. You have to work with them through every step of the process and see them through. Our coaches do a phenomenal job of having many touch points with our participants to guide him through that process. And we think that's really part of the reason or a big part of the reason why we've been successful for the last 28 years.

Fuller: Certainly one of the findings that people I talked to find most surprising about our research for jobs for lower skilled workers and middle skills workers, is that easily the number one source of a failed hire, somebody who's either fired from the job involuntarily separates or someone who decides to quit because it's not for them, is, is rooted in a soft skills issue. It's everything from, does someone have the attention to detail and the kind of professional skills of punctuality to someone's comfort level in the workplace. And America has been very, very focused on hard skills, technical skills, “can you program this, can you run that machine,” not realizing that epidemic of soft skills problems is what actually causes people who've invested in training and up-skilling themselves to fail to break through and get that family-sustaining job. What are employers saying about both when they anticipate perhaps beginning to grow workforces back and anything you're hearing differently, David, about what they think they're going to be looking for post-Covid, even in middle-skills workers?

Zammiello: We had a tremendous amount of job loss and predominantly a lot in the hospitality industry. In the healthcare industry particular, there is certainly job openings and needs in that area, as you would imagine. And so we anticipate continued opportunities to help people acquire the skills in the nursing profession and some of the allied health positions going forward. San Antonio has a fairly large information technology, cyber security presence, and we see that still being a viable option along with the trades and advanced manufacturing. But I think that the biggest thing across all of that though, Joe and it's really coming, continues to come true, is that the idea of having IT based skills and understanding how to operate in a digital environment is kind of a core necessity for, depending on any job you're taking, is really advancing anyone's skill sets, they have the basic IT fundamentals to function across, whether it's a marketing job or a job in the trades. And so we're focusing on that part of it and making sure that individuals have access to those resources. So we're looking and listening to the employers, this is an emerging event as we're speaking right now. And then the other part of that is it may not be the individuals need job training per se. They may have the prerequisite skills. They need a refresher on just how to job search, how to get out of the marketplace. And so we're working with different partners to provide that brand of job readiness training, not the technical training that you would necessarily need if you're going to pivot out of a hospitality industry job into a healthcare job.

Fuller: Certainly, one thing we're hearing from the executives and educators is a steady message that every job is going to have some digital content. It's going to require being able to interact with some type of device, read data off the device, do at these fundamental troubleshooting on the device. And that, that's just going to increase. So, whether it's educating young people in our K-12 system to be more comfortable with that, where it's more instinctive, they're used to it, not as a platform just for learning their school lessons, but the actual technology itself, how it works, why it works that way, how to interact with it, is going to be fundamental to anyone's future who's going to earn those household-sustaining wages. Let me come back to a question you've been dealing with the county government, with city government, both at the federal level, but also in terms of, in response to Covid, but also on an ongoing basis. Are there specific types of policy changes or enhancements that you can imagine that would make Project Quest’s jobs easier and the life of your people who are aspiring to build that brighter future for their families easier?

Zammiello: There's really a couple things. Here locally in San Antonio right now, our city government is approaching an idea to repurpose some of our public funds to help support a dedicated workforce development program. And that particular issue is being discussed as we speak here in the community, and over the next couple of months, it will be a front and center discussion, even to the point that there'll be an opportunity for this to be on the ballot in November for our citizens to consider if investing in workforce development could be the thing that the community wants to do. That said, that could lead to opportunities for more reliable funding streams. So, programs like Project Quest, if we are part of that kind of outcome, could sustain a level of operations to impact more people. It's interesting at the federal level we've been asked and we've contributed to conversations about ideas for legislation that would get to some of those same outcomes. If you look at workforce development programs that have produced certain evidence of outcomes, could there be a way to have something that would be sponsored at the federal level to make that kind of investment? And I said that before that as a grant-based agency, the biggest challenge is the unforeseen turns around sustaining your program. And you don't want to leave any of your participants without support. So if there was an underlying way to fund a program like Quest for a longer term view, you can really create, I think, a scalability factor that could be even more impactful. And at the same time on the... As we were talking about earlier, holding those standards out there, so the funding or the support has to lead to outcomes that are meaningful to the community. And you hold people to those standards and force them to demonstrate those outcomes. There's been conversations, and I'm optimistic that the value of workforce development, especially coming out of the Covid epidemic has, kind of, to me moved to the forefront. And I think that if we can tie that together, there's a real opportunity for programs like Quest or others that are in the workforce development space to really have a long-term lasting impact on their communities.

Fuller: Well, certainly we've not in my lifetime, had a convergence of circumstances where you had this level of instability in the workforce, combined with a very rapid and accelerating rate of change in business and really heightened focus on issues of economic inequality. And that combination may get us over the top to do some things that will position America for a more competitive future in the world economy and get more Americans economic independence. David, I want to thank you for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast. This has been very enlightening and we wish Project Quest 30 more years of success, and we’ll look forward to seeing more municipalities and maybe even states start emulating what you all have been pioneering down in San Antonio.

Zammiello: Well, thank you, Joe. I appreciate the opportunity to share the Quest story and I look forward to future conversations.

Fuller: We hope you enjoyed the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.