Joe Fuller: P-TECH, IBM’s high school program for helping students land good jobs in high tech, is in its 10th year. Delivered through public schools, the six-year program culminates in students earning an associate’s degree. It provides students with the skills and experiences they need to land competitive STEM positions. Since its launch in Brooklyn, New York, in 2011, P-TECH has grown to encompass 24 countries, involve 300 schools, and engaged 600 industry partners. P-TECH has proven a success to date. The initial findings of an ongoing third-party study show that P-TECH students have higher levels of attendance, higher graduation rates, and higher levels of job readiness than their contemporaries. A majority of participants also go on to pursue additional higher education. Drawing on their experience with P-TECH, IBM recently launched SkillsBuild, a training program that focuses on adults from vulnerable populations. And it’s also an open platform, allowing interested workers to hone their skills in a variety of areas. Can public-private partnerships like SkillsBuild and P-TECH provide people with access to the skills needed to fuel a post-Covid employment recovery? Are such partnerships a basis for reversing income inequality?

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. I’m joined by Grace Suh, who manages P-TECH and SkillsBuild as vice president of education and corporate social responsibility at IBM. We’ll be discussing the development of the P-TECH model, the launch of SkillsBuild, the challenge of delivering curriculum during the pandemic, and how public-private partnerships can help narrow the skills gap more broadly. Grace, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Grace Suh: Thank you very much. Happy to be here, Joe.

Fuller: Grace, maybe you could just share with us a little bit about your journey that [would] lead you to now be leading P-TECH for IBM. You’re not a lifelong IBMer.

Suh: I’m not a lifelong IBMer, although I have been here for ... I’m in my 25th year. I can hardly believe it. But my first job, my first real job out of school, was at the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice. And the children in our care were 99 percent Black and Hispanic. All were in poverty. They’d been charged with crimes and placed in detention, which had been traditionally viewed as dead time until they were adjudicated. So children could be in detention anywhere from three hours or three years. And our mission, which was very forward-thinking at the time, was to provide children with schooling, social services. So regardless of how long they were incarcerated, they began to form skills that would help to turn their lives around. So I was actually working in public relations there. I had an opportunity to spend time with children and their families—children in incredibly challenging circumstances. And I realized that I wanted to work in policy. So I went back to school, I earned my master’s in public policy, and then had the opportunity to go to the nonprofit sector. And I worked for the Children’s Defense Fund, which is an advocacy organization based in D.C. ’committed to improving the lives of poor children and families. I worked on a range of issues, realized that I wanted to focus more squarely on education as a lever for change, and also very much wanted to be back in New York City. I actually applied to a lot of jobs and education nonprofits. There was one that I really, really wanted. I didn’t get it. And unbeknownst to me, they shared my resume with IBM. Went for an interview. Didn’t know what to expect. And here I am all these years later, always working in corporate social responsibility, always focused on education. It’s been an amazing platform. I thought I would stay for maybe a year or two, but the work has really changed, and I’ve had the great opportunity to work for amazing leaders, being at the forefront as an industry on a number of issues—from standards to STEM education, high school reform, and now adult upskilling and reskilling.

Fuller: Let’s turn to the subject of P-TECH, which is IBM’s very widely discussed model for helping develop technical skills in young people. How long have you been engaged with the program? And maybe give us a brief history, because it’s over a decade old at this point.

Suh: Yeah. We launched our first school in Brooklyn, in the Crown Heights section of the borough, in 2011. We’re in our 10th year of P-TECH. I’ve been here for the entire time—from the planning stages when it was just an idea, and now into this movement where they’re now more than 220 P-TECH schools across 24 countries. Here in the U.S., we have over 120 schools, and we’re across 11 states, and working to grow the model. They are now more than 600 business partners involved, but IBM continues to steward the model forward and try to make it an opportunity for more and more young people around the world.

Fuller: P-TECH was one of the first initiatives in which an employer was directly involved in this type of education. Could you talk a little bit about what caused IBM to want to pursue this? And we can then talk about some of the other distinctive features of P-TECH.

Suh: So I think it’s two things. One is, there’s a lot of talk about the skills gap and companies not finding the talent they needed for open jobs. Certainly that was the case for IBM. And as a business-to-business company, we were hearing that from our clients and our customers as well. So this was an opportunity for us to think about how to address the skills gap, how business could nurture talent at an earlier age. And at the same time, really from a corporate social responsibility standpoint, how do we serve students from low-income, poor, and minority backgrounds, students who have been historically and consistently denied equitable education opportunities? So very much about education equity and workforce inclusion, thinking about who can lead and who can work as a way to actually address skill shortages as well.

Fuller: One of the interesting features of P-TECH is how it integrates multiple different vehicles for learning and combines academic with work-based learning. Could you talk about the model of P-TECH, because it really set a standard, a new standard, for the way companies approach trying to cultivate talent pipelines.

Suh: So at the foundation of P-TECH schools is public-private partnerships. So if you think about a school as a high school, a community college, and an industry partner or partners who are working together as a three-legged stool, and they are providing their best expertise and really integrating everything, as you said. So students are taking high school and college coursework at the same time. And in addition to that, they’re participating in a range of workplace experiences that include mentoring, site visits, project days. And if you think of those as exposure activities, then around age 16, when they have some college credit under their belt, they participate in paid internships. So they get to actually apply what they’ve been learning in school in actual jobs. In those jobs, they get to push the envelope on their skills, sharpen their skills—both academic, technical, and professional. Ultimately, at the end, they become first in line for jobs with their industry partners. So it’s really the full continuum, ensuring that students have the support they need to attain a college degree and have the experiences that are going to best prepare them for jobs.

Fuller: So, Grace, as I’m understanding it, you actually cut across traditional lines of demarcation in the education system, because you’re going from people who are in the early part of high school all the way through high school completion and onto associate’s degrees. Is that right?

Suh: That is right. We have a system that’s very siloed. There’s K–12, there is college, community college, and then there’s the world of work. So our idea is how do we de-silo the system, come together to provide students with the supports they need? Because we lose students in the gaps. We lose students in the gaps in high school and then the gap to college and then the gap to work. So our goal is to provide students with a seamless pathway so that they earn both their high school diploma and an industry-recognized associate’s degree. And then they’re fully prepared with credentials and skills to be able to secure entry-level jobs or go on for more study.

Fuller: You’ve talked about this as a public-private partnership. Presumably, the partnership is primarily with both school districts and with community colleges. “Public-private partnerships”—that term is thrown around very loosely by people as the way to solve problems. What have you all learned about what it takes to make one work?

Suh: I think it really is about understanding what is the expertise from each sector and how they integrate well together. I think there’s a lot of listening that has to happen, and everybody has to stay focused on the student at the center. I think especially business really needs to listen to educators and understand what it means to be able to develop skill sets in young people—both academic, technical, and the professional skills—and then work with educators to begin to nurture and foster those skills in young people. At the same time, the business needs to be able to clearly articulate the kinds of skills that it’s looking for in a talent so that educators can work toward building those skills. So it’s very much a coming together and setting goals for what is needed for education and for work.

Fuller: Those sound like very noble goals, obvious allocation responsibilities. What have you found are the biggest barriers to getting a P-TECH program off the ground when you, for example, go to a new geography?

Suh: So I think one of the biggest barriers to the implementation of P-TECH is actually around funding. We find that high schools, community colleges, and industry partners want this kind of opportunity, but it does cost more money. So we do provide the associate’s degree for free, and we want to make sure that students, especially because they’re from low-income backgrounds, have this opportunity without worrying about cost. So we need state funding in order to ensure that the model is sustainable over time. We don’t want to make a promise to children and their families that then morphs into something else. So we want to make sure that students have a full six years to complete their associate’s degree. Everything’s integrated, so we do have students who accelerate through the model and are able to graduate in less than six years. But for those students who need more time, we want to make sure that we give it to them. So the funding piece becomes really key.

Fuller: We’ve heard a lot in recent years about the need to provide, particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds, with all sorts of surround services to get them through those transition points and to help ensure that they don’t fall into those gaps that you described earlier when you described the integrative nature of P-TECH. What have you learned about what it takes to help shepherd a very young person through a multiyear program, which has demanding content throughout?

Suh: I think this is one of the benefits of a public-private partnership, because you’re able to see students in their totality, not just as a whole person—which is critical to look at them in terms of academics, but also their social, emotional learning—but also to look at them along their entire continuum of their full trajectory, from school to work. And so the public-private partners coming together are able to help students understand what the opportunities are at a young age so that they can make informed decisions. They can understand how what they’re learning in school ties to future work opportunities, exciting work opportunities that are well paid, that will enable travel, that will enable them to work on issues that they really care about. And then the supports along the way, so high school and college faculty working together to ensure that, one, students are prepared for college coursework and, two, once they’re in college coursework, college faculty understand how to work with 16-year-olds or 15-year-olds who are in college classes and be able to teach them successfully. At the same time, getting the supports from industry—the mentors who serve as role models and provide them with inspiration and motivation—giving the real work opportunities to young people, especially young people whose families may not have the social capital that are required to actually get these kinds of work opportunities, and then enabling young people to begin to build professional networks that we know beget further work. So all of these things coming together help ensure that students have a successful pathway from a young age all the way up into their first job.

Fuller: Can you talk a little bit about the results? I mean, you’ve now got almost a decade of history in terms of the number of people you’ve served, graduation rates, and what you know about their post-graduation employment status?

Suh: Well, the model has been in place for 10 years. We have about 30 schools or less that have gone through all six years of the model. We are seeing … and we have the best data from the schools that IBM is directly involved in, which is about 40 of the 220, and we’re starting to see data from other schools as well. But we are seeing higher attendance rates. We are seeing more students ready for college at an earlier age. And we are seeing, in some of our cohorts, college graduation rates that are four and five times the on-time national community-college graduation rate. We are finding that most students want to go on for more college. Sixty-five to 70 percent are pursuing more college. We see that as a huge win. Most of the students who attend P-TECH are first in their families to graduate with a college degree. At IBM, we’ve now hired more than 50 students into the company who are now my colleagues here. They’re working in “new collar” jobs, we call those jobs, that require more than a high school diploma, but not necessarily a four-year degree. They’re in cybersecurity, data science, customer service. We’ve also hired students into apprenticeships as well. There is a formal evaluation going on through MDRC. MDRC is a nonprofit research and evaluation organization based here in New York City. And they are looking at the first seven schools in the city. They’re about halfway through their five-year formal evaluation. They came out with a midterm report back in, I believe it was, May. And the initial results are very promising. So they did find that students were more likely to earn career and technical education course credits than the comparison group. And those extra credits translated into overall higher credit accumulation. And it didn’t come at the expense of core academic credits. So that was good to hear. And in addition, they suggested that the additional credits that students were earning really pointed toward a more modern career experience in high school, because students were taking courses, not in cosmetology, but rather they were taking courses in engineering and programming. So this is all good news. And in two years, we’ll have more data on college course-taking, as well as graduation.

Fuller: Grace, you mentioned a distinction between schools in which IBM is involved directly and other schools. Tell me about what IBM does to support those schools where you’re not in the program. And who are the employers that are supporting those initiatives?

Suh: Yeah, there are more than 600 business partners now involved in replicating the model. This is great news, because we really are thinking about high school reform, and, certainly, that’s not something that IBM as a sole company could achieve on its own. So it’s really important that educators across states and community college systems, along with industry, are replicating the model. IBM, because we started the model, we feel incredibly passionate about it. We are seeing results on the ground. We are committed to stewarding the model forward. So we’re having a lot of discussions across states to be able to replicate the model, get the funding required to replicate the model. And we’re also working to provide technical assistance to individual schools, as well as districts and states, because we want to make sure that the model is implemented with both quality and fidelity to our core principles, design principles. So we’re working to really build the network of schools, make them feel part of something bigger, sharing best practices with one another, and creating the connections across industry partners. Now, industry is working either as a sole business leader—like IBM is doing in most of our schools—or they’re working on consortiums. This is really about local economic reinvigoration. So in some places, we have small businesses working together to serve a single school—a mix of small and medium businesses—and then we have some big names as well, like American Airlines and Thomson Reuters and Global Foundries. Johns Hopkins University is involved in the model as well. IBM actually does share one school in Dallas. We share one with American Airlines. But in most cases, we’re serving as a sole industry partner for the schools that we’re involved [with].

Fuller: So, Grace, when you describe sharing the model and supporting the model with other industry partners, do you mean the model of intervention—what it takes, how you blend work-based learning, classroom learning? Or does it go directly into questions of training in specific technologies that are also core to the programs that IBM is directly involved in?

Suh: Yeah. This is really about preparing students for 21st-century opportunities. We would love graduates to come work at IBM, but it’s not about training them on IBM-specific technologies, per se. We know that not all students are going to come work at IBM. We want to make sure that they’re prepared to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. So that might mean they want to go work for a start-up, or that might mean that they want to come and work with us. P-TECH schools are about the design principles of the model, about the public-private partnership, the industry integration, the focus on underserved youth, making everything free, the time piece—up to six years to complete with a relevant associate’s degree. And then the curriculum, itself, comes from our education partners. So industry shares the skills that they need for jobs looking forward, as well as skills needed for today, and then working with our education partners to make sure that the integrated high school and college ladders up to those skills that are needed.

Fuller: But most of the programs have a core digital-technology and information-technology program that’s the foundation for preparing for these 21st-century jobs?

Suh: Actually, the fields that P-TECH schools are in at a very high level are, yes, IT. Also advanced manufacturing, as well as health. So those are the three main fields. I would say the foundational element among all the schools is a focus on the professional skills. So skill needs will change over time. And they’re going to change more quickly because of how quickly technology is changing. So the things that will stay evergreen are the professional skills that all employers want, which we know are the problem-solving skills, critical thinking, communication, teamwork, all of those collaboration skills. And being able to be agile. Because things are changing so rapidly, we’re looking for young people who are lifelong learners and willing to morph themselves over time as jobs change.

Fuller: Well, certainly, our research here at Harvard Business School confirms the absolute centrality of those “soft skills,” they’re often called, although I think a lot of us are uncomfortable with that term, because “soft” suggests easy as opposed to not technical, which is really the definition. Developing those professional skills early in your life is so central to getting on a pathway to economic independence and the types of outcomes that everyone hopes for. When you think back to the founding of P-TECH and IBM’s objectives in launching it, how do you feel you’ve done against those?

Suh: It’s been amazing. I don’t know that, when we started this model in 2011, we necessarily saw ourselves across 24 countries, across 11 U.S. states. At the same time, we developed the model to prepare for this day in that we never wanted to create a single jewel in Brooklyn, New York, serving just hundreds of students. Our goal was always to think about how a new model of education could become more embedded within education systems. So more embedded within the American education landscape—not as a sole model for a high school, but certainly as one pathway among new ways of thinking about how do we prepare students for careers and civic engagement. I think at the same time, we realize we have so much work to do. While a very significant implementation, it’s certainly just a drop in the bucket. So we’re thinking about how do we move with more urgency? How do we accelerate our efforts? How do we really capture the attention—which we’re in a very difficult time right now—but how do we capture the attention of policy makers to really think about, as everybody’s thinking about, rebuilding systems? How do we share what we’ve learned through P-TECH and make it more widely available?

Fuller: Well, you mentioned it’s a challenging time. We’re talking in the fall of 2020, just a few weeks before the elections in the United States. Also obviously, at a time when the economy and education, especially, is being severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. How has Covid affected P-TECH, the ability to deliver the curriculum, the work-based learning elements of the program? One would guess it’s been pretty disruptive.

Suh: Yeah, very disruptive. We’ve been thinking a lot about what good teaching looks like in an online or a hybrid learning environment. We think that these next months are going to be really critical to understanding what works well and then trying to replicate that across all of our schools. So we want to make sure that we’re really attuned to what’s going on across the P-TECH network, and then making sure that we learn from that. There’s a lot we’re trying to do as an industry partner. So we are shifting a lot of our work to online mentoring. We’re looking at virtual internships. IBM made an announcement just a few months ago that we would be providing 1,000 virtual internships across the P-TECH network because we know how really game-changing the opportunity to work is. And thinking also about how to provide students with workplace learning opportunities that are online. So one of the things that we did that just happened to coincide with Covid—but an initiative we had been working on for some time—was to put learning online. So knowing that P-TECH brick-and-mortar schools were just a drop in the bucket—we think we’re reaching about 150,000 students across the network—but how do we reach more students? So we developed an open P-TECH website, which is off of our ptech.org site, where any student can log on and participate in free learning on emerging technologies, whether that’s AI, quantum, data science, cybersecurity. And they can also build their professional skills in agile, design thinking. They earn badges along the way. In many cases, they’re the same badges that IBMers earn, so they have caché in the marketplace. So that’s another way that we’ve been thinking about how to provide students with opportunities. But, of course, this is a much bigger issue, because it’s a pandemic on top of something that’s already highly inequitable.

Fuller: Well, certainly in our research, it’s clear another consequence of the pandemic is that employers and governments are going to be accelerating their digitalization, their move to touchless processes. And that’s going to mean the jobs that are available, that are going to require the types of familiarity with technology and digital skills, as well as the very human skills you were talking about earlier if people are going to be ready for the jobs that are actually going to be available when we enter into a recovery.

Suh: I think the challenge will be to make sure that we’re not leaving students behind. As we know, Covid is exposing these inequities, but it’s also exasperating them. They are far too many young people who don’t have access to hardware, still. Students don’t have access to broadband. So they might be sharing a laptop with their siblings, they might be having to actually do schoolwork from a phone. So it’s a very challenging learning environment that many young people are finding themselves in. And, as a result, we know that there’s going to be a huge loss of learning. So it’s up to all of us, I think, not to just accelerate learning but to make sure that we’re bringing everybody along.

Fuller: IBM also has a second program related to learners later in their life, reskilling workers, called “SkillsBuild.” Could you talk a little bit about that and how it reflects the learnings from P-TECH, but also what’s different about it?

Suh: SkillsBuild is a new initiative. It’s less than a year and a half old. It’s a focus on adult upskilling and reskilling. Our primary audience is adults from vulnerable backgrounds, as well as adults from non-traditional backgrounds. Especially in Covid, with 3.4 million people having lost their jobs permanently, make a pivot, and really get a focus onto jobs that are going to give them economic mobility. With SkillsBuild, it is an online platform. A learner can come in and take an assessment. They can either pay attention to that assessment or choose from a number of career roles. And it can be in data science, cybersecurity, it can be in cloud computing. And then the learner will be able to go through a significant amount of coursework, earning badges along the way, with the idea that when they’ve completed that coursework, they have the skills necessary to be able to land jobs. Now, we know that an online platform in and of itself—especially for adults from vulnerable backgrounds—is not going to be enough to be able to prepare these adults for jobs. So SkillsBuild is really about partnerships. It’s about partnerships with nonprofit organizations that are serving these adults. And we integrate SkillsBuild into the training that nonprofits are already doing. We actually assign an IBMer to work with that nonprofit for a period of six months and integrate, again, what the nonprofit is providing, along with the online platform. Our learners also benefit from IBM coaches, and they participate in hands-on projects. So borrowing definitely from the P-TECH model about what we know about skills acquisition, but moving that into an adult audience. So the adults we’re working with can be veterans, immigrants, refugees. It could be people who were in one line of work and now want to switch to something that is more resilient over time.

Fuller: Another major announcement that occurred in October 2020 is IBM announced some major strategic moves, including separating some of its legacy businesses and focusing more on some of the rapidly growing apps like cloud services and whatnot. Is that going to have any implications for P-TECH?

Suh: No, we are fully committed to P-TECH, as well as SkillsBuild. We’re very poised to take advantage of a $1 trillion opportunity in hybrid cloud, and that means that we have to have the best talent at IBM. So we’re going to continue to have a laser-like focus on education and skills and really move with urgency to replicate P-TECH and SkillsBuild further.

Fuller: Well, Grace, thanks so much for joining us on this podcast, and telling us about the history of P-TECH, everything it’s accomplished, and your hopes for its future.

Suh: It was my great pleasure. Thank you so much.

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