Bill Kerr: Higher education in the U.S. has traditionally underemphasized work-based learning. Rising costs and questions about students’ job prospects have put skills and employability front and center. Meanwhile, employers complain of a lack of job-ready graduates. My Managing the Future of Work co-chair, Joe Fuller, recently appeared on Helix Education’s Enrollment Growth University podcast to discuss how colleges can address the middle-skills gap. We present that episode here. Enjoy the conversation.

Joe Fuller: “… We need to always reinforce the message that there’s dignity in work, that being someone, being a real person, doesn’t hinge on having that four-year degree. It hinges on the type of citizen, neighbor, productive contributing member of society you are.”

Eric Olsen: Welcome back to Enrollment Growth University, a proud member of the ConnectEDU podcast network. I’m Eric Olsen with Helix Education, and we’re here today with Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Fuller: Thank you, Eric. Delighted to be with you.

Olsen: Delighted to have you here and talk to you today about solving the middle-skills gap. Before we dig in, can you give the listeners a quick background on your role at HBS?

Fuller: Well, I’m a professor of management practice and teach in our MBA program. I also lead a long-term project at the school, called Managing the Future of Work, in which we examine issues affecting the evolution of work, mostly in the developed world, that a policymaker or, particularly, a business executive or institutional leader should be taking into account. We don’t just focus on skills, while that’s a major area of our work; we talk about and examine automation, how care economics and familial concerns influence productivity in work, skilled immigration, the relationship between higher ed and skills, and work readiness. So it’s pretty broad, but we’re trying to give decision makers practical insights into how they ought to think about adapting their organizations to be ready for the way work is evolving.

Olsen: Yeah, and it is that future-of-work focus that I’m excited to dig into with you today, specifically in an area that I don’t hear talked about potentially enough in higher ed. Joe, perhaps to kick us off today, can you start us off with a high-level definition of middle skills, and perhaps their correlation with consistently hard-to-fill jobs for employers?

Fuller: Middle skills is commonly defined as a skills-based set of competencies in an individual that can only be obtained by getting some type of post-secondary education or certification, but that simultaneously don’t require a college degree. An example of a middle-skills job, a classic one, would be a skilled construction worker, a carpenter, a pipe-fitter, an electrician, a welder, where to become a journeyman, you have to get through a certification program where you learn those skills. No one wants a self-taught amateur electrician wiring in their home, or for that matter, a self-taught dental hygienist—whether it’s a vet tech, a dental hygienist. Also, skills like the ability to repair a heavy-duty truck engine. Or lots of skills in business—like bookkeepers or accounts payable or accounts receivable clerks or marketing analysts—they don’t necessarily have to have a four-year degree, although the trend over time in the United States has been to have more jobs and more employers who offer those jobs requiring a four-year degree for jobs that were historically in a gray area or did not require a college degree.

Olsen: Yeah. Joe, you’ve done some really incredible and fascinating research in this middle-skills space, going back to the Great Recession. What do we know so far about the pandemic’s effects on these middle-skills jobs?

Fuller: Well, like most things, it’s a pretty broad-based systemic effect. The first thing is, it knocked back the education plans of a significant number of aspiring workers. There were dramatic increases in the number of people that either suspended permanently or postponed plans to go to school. Of course, we saw that in the enrollment numbers at community colleges, which are really, easily, the biggest source of middle-skills talent in the United States. The second thing is that for certain middle-skills jobs—like the ability to repair a truck engine, or for that matter, to drive an 18-wheeler over-the-road heavy-duty truck—demand really picked up. But for other middle-skills jobs—let’s say those in the hospitality sector, or an aviation tech, someone who repairs jet engines—as engine hours went down in the travel industry, a significant reduction of demand, certainly for new workers, and in most instances, furloughs or layoffs for incumbent workers. So it’s been a very uneven distribution.

Olsen: You mentioned this concept of this falls into a gray space. I think when I asked you that question about, “Boy, I’m surprised higher ed doesn’t talk about this more,” I think you potentially answered that in terms of, “Yeah, we’re not sure that’s the market that we serve.” So I’m curious, as you’ve studied this group and part of the economy so carefully, how should higher ed think about serving—ideally credentialing—this middle-skills gap? Do we force upon them our four-year degrees that we’re accustomed to, or do we think about something different?

Fuller: Well, it’s a very interesting time because, of course, the “worth what paid for” debate in higher ed, especially for four-year institutions, is raging. And more parents and learners want a representation that investing their time and money in getting a degree is going to lead to an economic outcome that justifies the investment. Strangely, a lot of the disciplines taught through or often associated with middle skills fit with a lot of the jobs of tomorrow. Oftentimes, middle-skills jobs have to do with learning a technology. As digital technology becomes ubiquitous in all sorts of jobs of all different collars—white collar, blue collar, and everything in-between—having the capacity of an educational institution to impart those, what are generally called “hard skills,” becomes more important. I think that, for four-year institutions, being cognizant of the fact that the attributes we attributed to college graduates historically—that they would have high self-efficacy and work ethic, they’d have good written oral communication skills, they would know how to tackle a problem—those are now being supplemented by requirements to have some ability or some aptitude for both learning and working with technology. That’s often limited to our computer science programs in a higher-ed institution. Let’s distinguish also two-year institutions from four-year institutions. Community colleges, historically, have been the font of a lot of middle-skills workers, and in about half the states, CTE programs and competency-based programs are still a significant part of community college curricula. In the other half of the states, there’s a higher emphasis on general studies and preparing students to matriculate to a four-year institution to get on that more normative path that we associate with the American dream. I think what’s a very important thing for educational leaders is to dignify—in the way they describe what their institutions do and in their commentary on education issues, especially with an administration that seems to be very, very inclined to do some big things in the sector—to really dignify the types of jobs that are associated with middle skills. With only 40 percent of today’s 18-year-olds likely to graduate from a four-year institution—that’s, of course, an average in which Asian Americans and Caucasians historically will have been overrepresented and African Americans and Hispanics will be underrepresented—we need to always reinforce the message that there’s dignity in work, that being someone, being a real person, doesn’t hinge on having that four-year degree. It hinges on the type of citizen, neighbor, productive contributing member of society you are.

Olsen: Let’s talk about that posture of dignity, specifically when we’re talking with local employers. You mentioned the systemic nature of the pandemic and how hard it was, equally, or at least on everyone to varying degrees. When we’re looking at employers, maybe in our communities who are going through a lot and trying to navigate and figure out what next looks like for them dealing with critical, critical retention issues, what should our posture be from a partnership standpoint, from a consultation standpoint, in terms of, should we not only see our four-year degrees as good upskilling credentials, but should we think about this middle-skills group and this idea of, “Hey, employer, let’s think about how to upskill your entry-level workers to these middle-skills jobs in order to create a better pathway program within your organization to increase your retention.” What should that posture and conversation look like with our local employers?

Fuller: Well, I think it’s really an important issue you’re touching on here, Eric, because the velocity of change in jobs is such now—and particularly the technological requirements and the actual technology being used is turning over so fast—that it’s more or less impossible to expect an institution of higher education to keep up with that, to know what the state of the art is, to be able to change curriculum that quickly, in many cases, where you have to have hands-on learning, to be able to change the software licenses you own, the hardware you’ve got, to teach people on. What we absolutely need to convey, not just to employers, but to educators and to policymakers, is we need a significant increase in the availability of work-based learning that is part of degree attainment—whether it’s associate’s degree attainment or bachelor’s degree attainment—that it’s only in the workplace that people really master skills. It’s increasingly only in the workplace where the approaches and the technologies you need to master to be qualified to get a job are accessible to a learner. So whether it’s a co-op program—of course, I’m from Boston, where Northeastern University is the absolute platinum standard in terms of cooperative education—whether it’s something like that or a much greater broadening of what constitutes apprenticeship in the United States or work-based learning. Even starting in high school, where you have innovative programs like CareerWise Colorado, where you’ve got kids who, as part of their high school degree completion, are working for an employer often at the same time doing some dual-enrollment studying at a local community college, the very serial A to B to C: You go to high school, you graduate, you go to community college, and then matriculate to a four-year college. Or you go to community college and then enter the workforce. It’s all very linear. The educational resources of the country are expected to create, and at the end of the diploma line, deliver to the workforce someone who is able to get a household-sustaining-level job. That kind of railroad-track model just doesn’t fit anymore with where technology is. So what we need is to both get more flexibility on educators and more receptivity and effort by educators to encourage employers that are in that type of relationship. We need more employers to stop expecting that the way the world is supposed to work is, they’re supposed to be able to enter the spot market for talent and find exactly what they were looking for on-demand. And we should be saying to policymakers, particularly now at the federal level, “Look, you can do things like have free community college.” There are pros and cons to that, but you’re just changing the coefficient on one variable in an equation that is increasingly out of sync with what we need as an economy and as a society, which is more people in good-paying household-sustaining-level jobs which have a future. That really, really benefits from compensated work-based learning that is part of degree completion, so the learner understands that “I am getting articulation into course credits for this, and I’m earning enough”—because over 50 percent of community college students are working learners—so “I’m earning enough to pay my bills, to stay in school, to complete this program so I can get a good full-time job.” That requires everybody rethinking their definition of success. Educators can’t say, “We’re all about education, and we’re not a trade school. The employer really has to understand what we need from them.” Yep, fair enough, and vice versa.

Olsen: Yeah. Joe, tremendous, tremendous thoughts. Finally, can you leave us with some next-steps advice here for institutions listening to this, excited about it, slightly nervous about where to move forward, but they want to better serve and better solve for the middle-skills gap, both to better serve their own student population, as well as to help service their local employers? Where should they start first?

Fuller: Well, first, they should be very active in engaging employers and trying to understand how employers view the product they currently create in the form of their graduates. The second thing they should do is understand that merely creating a more mature young adult who has good communication skills, good self-efficacy, good research skills, some level of presentability, that’s not enough anymore. Employers are saying regularly, “Graduates from college don’t know how to manage a project. They know how to take a course, and they think in hundred-day increments, because that’s the length of the semester. And they think about, ‘I have eight weeks to get this done as, and therefore, I can maybe take this week off because I want to watch the European soccer championship because I’m a soccer fan, but that’s okay, I’ll still have seven weeks to do my term paper.’” Business is about being productive or being in a government agency, but doing your job every day. They’re not good and not skilled, not experienced, on working in teams, especially teams of people not like them. By that, I don’t mean so much racial or gender diversity as a 60-year-old, a 50-year-old, a 40-year-old, somebody calling in from the Mumbai office, or a skilled gig worker, complicated teams. I think the other thing they should be doing is experimenting. Educational institutions generally aren’t good at experiments, strangely enough. Maybe they are in the chem lab, but they’re not in terms of curriculum. I think trying some experiments with employers or partnering with outside nontraditional vendors—I’m not talking about textbooks, suppliers or whatnot, but I’m talking about technology companies or others—to see if they can create a new curriculum that really equips people to have a better launch into the workplace. Final thing I would do, I would be upgrading my career and professional services office, my placement office. One of the things I’d be doing is getting data from and making it accessible to the students about things like: What jobs are available in healthcare, in high tech, in manufacturing, in professional services? What do the job descriptions actually say? How can we help students map what employers say they’re seeking with our course catalog? So we’re not just leaving the students to muddle through and submit resumes to the employers who happen to hire at our institution. Expand that population of suppliers, of recruiters. Give the students much better access to market data about what jobs are actually on offer in the community you want to live in. What do they pay? And then, what do they require? The freshmen should be having that conversation. More data, more engagement with employers, and more experimentation with curriculum, and particularly, aggressive experimentation and moves into work-based learning.

Olsen: Joe, thanks so much for your time, your thoughts, and your continued research in this space. What’s the best place for listeners to connect with you if they have any follow-up questions?

Fuller: Well, Eric, they can contact me through the faculty landing page of my bio at the Harvard Business School. If you go to the Harvard Business School website and go to the faculty tab, you’ll find me at the end of the F’s, “Fuller.” Then, also, we have a project work site, Managing the Future of Work. Just Google that at Harvard Business School: Managing the Future of Work at Harvard Business School. All my research is up there. Our podcast series—we have almost 200 now up—is available there and searchable there. And we have a newsletter people can sign up for.

Olsen: Awesome. Joe, thanks so much for joining us today.

Fuller: Eric, my pleasure.

Kerr:We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.