Podcast
Podcast
- 07 Jun 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
Changing the skills narrative: Opportunity@Work’s Byron Auguste
Bill Kerr: Does a tech support or data analytics job require a four-year college degree? What about a sales rep or registered nurse? Specialized training and skills acquired in other jobs can provide the necessary background. Yet positions that promote upward mobility, many of the middle-skills jobs, often carry degree requirements that exclude otherwise qualified workers. The pandemic may have increased opportunities. Research on job postings points to a post-Covid bump of several million positions offering higher-than-median wages and open to non-college graduates. This echoes the recent trend of more employers dropping the college degree as a proxy for job readiness. Yet degree inflation remains widespread, with negative consequences for the two-thirds of the American workforce that lacks a four-year degree and for the employers who miss out on the needed and diverse talent.
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Byron Auguste, CEO and Co-Founder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit focused on career-sustaining employment for workers without a college degree. The organization also researches policies and practices that support so-called workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes, or STARs. We’ll talk about the STARs community, how employers can benefit from skills-based hiring, and how Opportunity@Work is changing the narrative. And we’ll talk about the wave of state-level policy changes, opening many public-sector jobs to non-college graduates. Byron, welcome to the podcast.
Byron Auguste: Thank you.
Kerr: Byron, maybe we’ll start with a bit of your background and the origins of Opportunity@Work.
Auguste: I grew up in a very large extended family. I have literally hundreds of people I know to be a kin of mine, and most of them are STARs. Most of them have worked for a living their entire adult lives, and they’ve gained all sorts of skills. Some have gone to college. And there’s just a full spectrum of the American experience, in a way. And I will say, I learned from that long before any randomized control trials that, while all the things that people say are good to do are typically good to do—study hard, work hard, all the rest of it—lots of things happen. Life is very complicated, and life in this country and making your way is extremely challenging. So the idea that the only way someone can demonstrate skills and worthiness and conscientiousness is by, at 18, being ready and able and can’t afford to get into college, and at 22, to be out there and just to follow the straight path, that’s not realistic for the vast majority of Americans. And so I’ve known from long before I kind of had any credentials, myself, that there were all sorts of people that could do all sorts of things and contribute.
Kerr: And you’ve spoken often about your father’s career arc. Can you say a bit more of that and its link to the STARs community?
Auguste: Yeah. It is very emblematic. So he went to college for about a year before he started to work. He felt that he needed to work. And it’s not surprising, since I was born right around that time, and I was about two years old when my dad was working—this was in Detroit, in a factory, he was sort of a shipping clerk—and he wasn’t really going anywhere. And he saw an ad in the newspaper that said something like, “Learn COBOL, and punch your own ticket,” which was sort of a COBOL pun. COBOL is the IBM computing language at the time for mainframe computers. And there weren’t COBOL degrees, because it was a new language. And there was this huge demand. Now, my dad had never worked in technology. He had actually never worked in an office, as such, but he looked it up, he found out what it was, and he thought, “Well, maybe I can do it.” My mom was working. Things weren’t as expensive back then. So my dad was able to leave his job, his factory job, and study COBOL for six months. I still have a copy of his certificate that he earned. And then my mom, who worked at what was then Detroit Edison, got someone in the MIS department—Management Information Systems, as IT departments were then called—to give my dad a job shadow, just see what he can do. And they had him come in, see what they were doing. They had him read some code, write a little code. And so they took him on as a junior COBOL programmer. And that was the trajectory shift of my family, the Auguste family, into the American middle class. He had a chance to show what he could do. And it turned out, he turned out to be an excellent COBOL programmer, and that was the career he pursued.
Kerr: There are many ways you could have perhaps sought to influence and impact the STARs community. Tell us specifically about Opportunity@Work. How’s it organized? What’s the way that it approaches this problem?
Auguste: Right. I worked in business for quite a while. I was a management consultant. I became a senior partner at a management consulting firm. This notion of talent as incredibly precious and valuable was completely core to how you thought about building organizations and businesses. And then I was an economic adviser to President Obama and really focused for two years, 2013 into 2015, on good jobs—like more jobs, better jobs, higher wages, and the productivity and competition and innovation that drives all of that and investments. And there was such a different narrative in that world about talent. So it’s more, they’re long-term unemployed, and what are we going to do about people who don’t have a path forward? As it turns out, about half of the skilled workforce is assumed not to be relevant to the new, to the technical, and the like. It was about how the demand signals, this need for skills, was being translated to a very reductionist, oversimplified, “Oh, people need to have these degrees.” And if you didn’t change that fact, it was very clear that you could not translate these public and private investments that were being made and needed to be made into actually an inclusive labor market, a skills-based labor market, where people could continue to learn and earn to their full potential. And it turns out there are 70 million Americans in the workforce who are skilled through alternative routes. They don’t have bachelor’s degrees, but they absolutely have skills. And they have those skills from a range of routes—from military service, from community college, from all sorts of workforce training, all sorts of blended or digital training. There are more ways right now to learn than ever. And yet we have this very inflexible kind of model of saying, “Who is talent, who is skilled?” And the final thing to note is, where STARs gain their skills most of all is the same place all the rest of us gain our skills most of all, which is on the job. And so what Opportunity@Work does, as its essence, is it makes it possible—from a data analytics standpoint, from a hiring workflow standpoint, and then also in a public narrative standpoint—to make STARs visible, to make their skills visible, to make the value they add visible, and to open up pathways that they’re already often traveling, but with all sorts of barriers in their way. So that’s the heart of what we do.
Kerr: Can you talk to us about some of the programs that you bring, the way you harness the data analytics, some of the tangible workstreams that Opportunity@Work has in place?
Auguste: We talk about rewiring the U.S. labor market. So for businesses to do that, they need data. They need data, and they need a plan. So we have a tool called “Stellarsight,” where a business can look at the jobs that it’s looking to fill in the geographies and whatnot. And we can show you how—if you open up your criteria to be more skills-based, not just degrees—how many more people with that skill set are accessible to you in that market. And that’s broken down very granularly, geographically, by pathway, and that takes all the relevant public data sets, quite a few proprietary data sets—Lightcast, most notably—along with everything that the government puts together. But we’ve got it in a form, and it’s highly visual. So we give the tools for those companies individually to see what their possibilities are and then to see, in aggregate, “Oh, as a business community, we could open up these pathways.” So companies both have to remove the degree screens, the things that are keeping them apart, but then to have a wide diversity of companies so you can gradually make it more like, “Show what you can do, and the jobs look for you.” And so part of what we do there, too, is to try to activate regions or industries where there’s a critical mass, that has sort of a diverse set of jobs at different level of competencies. So what are the alternative routes? I’m talking about Merit America, NPower, Per Scholas. Of course, there’s community colleges. There’s all these digital programs. So which routes work for you? And so we help those entities plug in. We’re not training people. But there’s great training out there. We’re not the ones having people demonstrate their skills, but they might be demonstrating them on GitHub or Stack Overflow or lots of other places. So it’s how, over JobCase, how do you connect those dots? So again, rewire. We have these silos that exist, and we have a set of technology and methods that we’ve used in other sectors to connect those dots—through application programming and integrations, through microservices. So we are using kind of modern tools to solve what I would consider one of the top three most important problems that we’re facing, which is how do we actually help people translate their energy, their passion, their creativity, their aspiration, their skills into meaningful work, well-compensated work that contributes, that solves problems that society needs solving? And then the last thing I would say, wrapped around the whole thing, is this campaign and this coalition called Tear the Paper Ceiling. And this is a campaign—Opportunity@Work and the Ad Council are at the center of it—but there are over 50 partners, big companies, the leading workforce organizations in the country, and really the message here—and its STARs speaking about their own journeys, their own contributions—it’s creating a coalition of companies and nonprofits that can actually, frankly, solve this problem collectively.
Kerr: That’s amazing. I want to come back in a minute and let’s talk some more about the Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign. But with such a large way that you can impact lives and employers and so forth, I can imagine you trying to measure the organization’s impact in terms of the rate of STAR employment, in terms of upward mobility, in terms of productivity, diversity. There’s so many ways that could do. How have you thought about the organization’s central mandate or central metrics?
Auguste: Yeah, well, there’s metrics that we track in a way on behalf of the country, because this is a problem that the United States absolutely needs to solve if we are going to be able to effectively innovate, work at solving problems. You see now major public investments in, for example, reshoring semiconductors and supply chains to the U.S., which is a massive, massive talent and workforce challenge to do that effectively. You see that in the energy transition on a huge scale in like 20 different sub-sectors. You see that in our infrastructure more generally. You see that in cyber, and then there’s healthcare. So in other words, there is this massive need. And so one thing we do from our insights and analytics reports is say, “How are we doing as a country?” And we do that with partners, including Harvard Workforce Project, including Lightcast, Accenture, and many other entities track it. How are we doing? For example, if you look at the past two decades, up to Covid, we saw 8 million, almost 8 million what we call “gateway” and “destination” jobs, the jobs by which STARs and others gain upward mobility, being put off limits to STARs. If STARs kept their share of those jobs—it included things like admin assistance, jobs that you can move into from lots of other jobs, and then you can move up and out into lots of other jobs—those jobs, 7.8 million STARs, have been excluded from that in the last 20 years. Now the good news is, in the last four or five years as we’ve started, we’ve halted that movement away from inclusion and started to move toward skills-based inclusion. I will emphasize that we are only just getting started, but it’s good news that it’s moving in the right direction. In April this year, I was with Governor Phil Murphy in New Jersey, as New Jersey announced that it was tearing the paper ceiling and removing degree screens from lots of states jobs, ultimately thousands of jobs made available to STARs. And it’s a movement. There’s many, many entities, including the 50 members of Tear the Paper Ceiling, but others, too, that are really kind of driving this in the right direction. So we do take that seriously. But we don’t consider ourselves to be the sole people producing that macro-level outcome. We do measure ourselves in terms of, if you will, this mid-level of how are we enabling? As we enable the companies that are part of our network, the states now that are part of our network, we look at how many jobs are they opening up to STARs. Are they removing the degree screens or other barriers that prevent STARs from even competing? Then, how many STARs are they actually hiring in these roles? And then, ultimately, as the value of STARs is demonstrated, how is funding and resources flowing back to these alternative routes channels? I mean, the amount of money we put into colleges and universities, compared to the amount of money we put into all other channels put together, it’s not even close. So the idea that there should actually be resources flowing behind effective alternative routes, behind effective inclusive talent developers, that’s a very important part of the long-term picture. So those would be the three main metrics with this network we work with.
Kerr: That’s great. Let’s continue with the campaign and both toward policymakers and also employers. As you’re trying to get them to adopt skills-based criteria, what have been some of the key arguments that you bring to those circles that are the effectiveness? And also what are some of the counterarguments you hear back that you need to quickly rebut?
Auguste: Yeah, well, it’s a little different from policymakers and employers, although, I’ll note that government is both a policymaker and an employer.
Kerr: Huge employer.
Auguste: Yeah, a huge employer. So from the standpoint of an employer, including government, the case is fundamentally this: If you have jobs that need doing, having those seats open, having the work undone is a business problem for you. You are forgoing either orders, or productivity, or innovation, or customer satisfaction in a way that damages your business or your function if you’re a government. Number two, and more measurable, is that if you only ever hire the most poachable person, stop complaining when they’re poached in 15 months or when they want to do another job. For example, there’s a huge, huge need for SaaS administrators and SaaS application developers—by “SaaS,” [I mean] software as a service. For an example, this would be Salesforce. Now, there is also—and we can see this in the Stellarsight’s database, in our STARs mobility data model—there are hundreds of thousands of people, mainly STARs working in small businesses using Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets or whatever to manage a customer pipeline. Building little macros. And they’re doing all the work that a Salesforce administrator and much of the work a Salesforce app developer would do. They’re making, on average, probably about half of what a Salesforce administrator makes, and they’re doing the same work with less tailor-made software. And yet, these are not the people that companies are going to hire for Salesforce administrator roles or for their equivalent roles at ServiceNow or other places like that. So what is the implication of that? Well, it means, one, there’s a shortage—quote/unquote “shortage”—of Salesforce administrators and app developers. If companies keep going to hire people with elite bachelor’s degree credentials or for consulting firms to do that, they might be able to hire them. But for those people, it’s getting their foot in the door, and nine months later they want to be doing a different job. And they have this experience, and they’re moving on, either within your company or beyond. And so now you’re back to square one. You have a constant churn, whereas, you have people who don’t have bachelor’s degrees, people who are STARs who are doing relevant work, who have absolutely that skillset, who would be getting a big pay increase and think this was an excellent job and would be much higher retention. And that is measurable. The cost of that turnover is very high. And then, if you zoom the lens back, what if you’re Salesforce, or what if you’re ServiceNow, or what if you’re Cisco? What if you are someone who depends on your customers having an ecosystem of administrators, of after-sales service providers, of that. If your customers all insist on going after the same small talent pool, then you can’t actually build your business. And if you look at the growth projections of these software-as-a-service giants, they will absolutely fail to meet their growth projections if they can’t find a way to change the aperture for their customers. So that’s one reason they often want to work with us, because getting that change to happen is of a very tangible valuation business imperative for them. So a lot of what we do in this translation is not just to quote/unquote “advocate” for people who want better jobs. It’s not a favor to give someone a job. They’re doing you a favor. They’re bringing their energy, their talent, they’re doing work you need done. It’s demonstrating to employers that if they want to succeed, they need STARs talent. And their exclusionary practices are actually shooting themselves in the foot and undermining their own businesses. And we have the receipts to prove it.
Kerr: One of the research reports of this project a while back, called Dismissed by Degrees, was very much in line with productivity of the people that did not have the degree, versus those that did was perhaps comparable, perhaps on par.
Auguste: Yes.
Kerr: But the retention and the satisfaction was very different and very marked, to your points. In your line, in your work and vantage point, do you see certain employer types publicly traded versus privately held, or industries, or company sizes that are further along the skills-based hiring journey than others?
Auguste: I guess the term of art would be, it’s more of a psychographic. It’s more of a, what’s the belief system and the ethos of the entity in many cases? But that said, moving from where we are to where we want to be does look different for different kinds of businesses, in the sense that, let’s say a classic smaller or midsize business, let’s say 100 employees, 200, typically there’s like one or two people that can make the decision to make the change, and often there’s an open-mindedness. Their challenge is that they don’t have the ability to change the system, which is why, one of the things we do in working with these larger companies, these name brand companies, that is to say, “Look, if you open up in this inclusive way, lots of people will beat a path to your door, and you will absolutely want to hire some of them. There will be STARs who show up that you’ll want to hire, and there will be STARs that show up who have skills that are very relevant to the business but that maybe, for you, you’re not going to hire—just like most people with college degrees, you’re not going to hire if you are only hiring this tiny sliver of people. So what does that mean? If you do this collectively—and that’s so much of what Opportunity@Work does—then, hey, these smaller businesses, maybe your suppliers who are actually having a much harder time than you to hire talent, they will also hire people with skills. And who knows? Maybe that person three years later is someone you’ll want to hire. So if you can show your skills in all sorts of ways, and companies can access them in all sorts of ways, then way more success will happen, both on the company side and the STAR side. And the feedback on how to do that well can go in aggregate to the talent developers or the pathways that people are going through. One thing that’s been noted, I think, in Dismissed by Degrees, too, is how do you send feedback to those who are training for you? If you don’t give your talent suppliers, if you will, any guidance, then why would they send you what they need? But if every company had to interact with every school or every pathway or every training program, that obviously would never happen because it would be too expensive, and cumbersome, and the like. So again, the value of a utility, the value of a marketplace, the value of a platform is very, very high to ensure that you can get the right signals back.
Kerr: We have a community college report that’s getting exactly into this supplier-employer relationship. Let’s segue though to the public sector side, and you’ve had significant progress with states as an employer dropping requirements. A little bit more of just how those conversations go, and what are some of the things you see on the horizon?
Auguste: We started first in Maryland, and the conversation was—one aspect of the conversation is very similar to the way it is now, which is that there were a lot of open jobs. I mean, the public sector got hit very hard in Covid. If you look at the demographics of public-sector employment, a lot of people who might have stayed longer just decided to retire on time or take early retirement. And so there were a lot of really important jobs that are important to people in every state, for example, that were going unfilled. And that’s true across the country. So that part of the conversation to say, well, if you’re shutting out half the skilled workforce from jobs you don’t need to, I think it’s been very valuable to show from a data standpoint that there are really hundreds of thousands of people who don’t have degrees who you’re excluding, who actually do jobs like this in the private sector, who could do jobs like this in the public sector, and the evidence. So that’s why the data’s so important for public sector, because public sector can’t just do things on a whim. It typically has to have some rationale, and some data and evidence. And I will say some of the pushback, not by those we’re talking with directly, but those that are kind of wondering about it, they wonder, “Oh, wait a minute, are you going to lower the standards for these jobs? Are you going to reduce the pay for these jobs?” And our position—and so far all the states we’ve worked with position—is no, the standards are how to do this work effectively that needs to be done. And if people are doing that work effectively, there’s no reason you should pay them less. So as far as I know, there’s not been a single instance when any state we’ve worked with has changed the terms of employment. They’ve simply changed who is eligible to show what they can do. And the standards of hiring are the same. I think that’s one of the biggest mythologies that needs to be punctured, is this idea that if you exclude lots of people without knowing anything about them, without knowing what they can do, that that somehow makes you a high-standards employer. If people have skills to do these jobs, and your systems are too clunky to recognize their skills, that does not make you a high-standards employer, that makes you a way-behind-the-curve employer. And it’s the really innovative, smart employers that are latching onto and driving this kind of skills-based hiring. I published, co-authored, an op-ed with Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn. And the two concepts in our op-ed that we wrote together were, number one, that skills is really the new currency in the labor market. And number two, that 70 million STARs are a huge part of the payoff to businesses to adopting a skills-based approach.
Kerr: Byron, let me continue, though, with a polar sort of view here, kind of push you on this bit. Should we just be done with degrees? Is there anything that’s lost when degree requirements are dropped? I mean, we give opportunities to STARs, but does that mean that there’s value still in the college degree?
Auguste: I mean to say you need a medical degree to perform surgery is common sense, but to say that you need a generic bachelor’s degree of any kind to be a salesperson, to do IT operations, to be a logistics manager, this is very common, but it does not make any sense. Look, college is great. And the higher-education system and its diversity and so forth is a real asset. It’s a tremendous asset to this country. However, that’s not the same as saying that if someone doesn’t have a degree that we should not care at all about the other ways they can learn and the other, and the ways they can contribute, and the demonstrated performance they have. College, university, that can be a great bridge to opportunity. But if we make it a drawbridge that pulls up and the more than half of Americans who don’t cross it are somehow surplus to requirement, that is a disaster for this country. There’s a lot of upside in adults working and learning and having much more flexible mix of learning on the job and learning in the institutional setting. And our existing college, university, system could be more of a part of it. Our community college system is already an incredibly important part of it.
Kerr: Byron, we’re recording this in April of 2023. And the world, whether it’s university, business, and I’m sure Opportunity@Work, has been contemplating thinking about artificial intelligence, it’s adoption, ChatGPT, some of the many things that are coming very quickly. It seems every week’s got something new down toward us. Any thoughts about where that takes us in terms of the acquisition of skills, and the way Opportunity@Work will be positioning itself toward the future?
Auguste: Yes. I think that technology is often invoked in a hand-waving sort of way, as if, well, maybe we could do that except technology. Or, well, I don’t want to do that except technology, as if technology was gravity. But technology’s not gravity. Technology is a body of knowledge and tools instantiated in software and hardware and all sorts of forms. Technology is human ingenuity instantiated in ways that are much more scalable than just individual humans. And technology is developed, and technology is deployed in a system that rewards certain deployments—and maybe others less. So people should not blame the tools if they’re worried about the future. They should fix the rules. We should fix the rules about how and for what purposes we’re rewarded for doing things. I don’t know if you remember a few years ago, Elon Musk tried to fully automate, I think it was the Nevada plant, the Tesla plant. And he’s a pretty smart guy, broke his pick on it, couldn’t do it. And I don’t know if you remember he said in a press conference, “It turns out people are pretty useful after all. People are pretty good at some things.” And that’s true. People are really good at some things. It’s always been the question for technology: How do we direct technology to augment people, to help us solve our problems, to help us do our work better, accomplish more? I should mention, of the 70 million STARs, 5 million STARs are already in high-wage jobs. The most two common professions are software developer and CEO. People have so much more potential than we give them credit for. And if we understand that, then yes, people, all sorts of people, very much STARs included, can use generative AI to accomplish their tasks, too. And I think you’re seeing already a real flourishing of small businesses, single-person businesses, actually using it to extend their reach from the standpoint of sales materials and the like. So I don’t think there is any—certainly not any information technology— in the world today that we should say, “Oh, that means we’re in trouble at work.” No, it means that we need to be serious about taking people’s talent seriously and marrying it with these tools.
Kerr: Byron, as we get to the end here, a final question. What’s next for Opportunity@Work? What would you like to be accomplishing over the next three, five years? What change are we hoping to continue to spark?
Auguste: Well, fundamentally, we are here as a utility to solve a problem that, if that people want to solve it, we can solve it. STARs are showing up on the job every day, working, learning, contributing, trying to figure out what can I do more? The challenge is that the rest of the institutional structure of our society needs to show up for them. That’s employers, that’s policymakers, that’s education, that’s innovators. That’s us, that’s all of us. So what the future for Opportunity@Work, and it starts right now, is anyone listening to this, should come either to tearthepaperceiling.org or opportunity@work.org, and let us know what you want to contribute to this movement, because our job is to make sure you can do it and connect the dots with others doing the same.
Kerr: Byron, thank you so much for joining us today.
Auguste: Thank you.
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.