Podcast
Podcast
- 15 Jan 2025
- Managing the Future of Work
OneTen CEO Debbie Dyson: Why "skills-first" builds a better workforce
Joe Fuller: The legal, political, and cultural ground has shifted under the labor market. But skills gaps and lackluster workforce participation remain constants. Changing demographics, technological advancement, and the growing importance of social skills require employers to cast a wider net in searching for qualified candidates. How can companies attract a larger group of applicants? Dropping the four-year college degree requirement is a good place to start, but the impact of curbing degree inflation has been marginal at best. While skills-based hiring may represent a practical and non-controversial strategy, it’s proving difficult to implement.
Welcome to the Managing of the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Debbie Dyson, chief executive officer of OneTen. The nonprofit was founded in 2020 by a coalition of leading U.S. firms, with the goal of hiring or promoting 1 million Black workers into career-sustaining jobs over the next decade. We’ll talk about the coalition’s evolving mission in light of the 2023 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in college admissions and the implications for corporate hiring. We’ll discuss OneTen’s skills-first playbook and what it takes to get from endorsing the concept to prioritizing it. We’ll also consider the role of “soft skills”—also known as social skills—and the multigenerational workforce perspective. And we’ll talk about how to avoid the pitfalls of artificial intelligence in HR, while tapping that technology’s potential to improve talent development and acquisition. Debbie, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.
Debbie Dyson: All right, Joe. Thanks so much for having me.
Fuller: Debbie, you lead OneTen, which is an organization that I’m certainly familiar with, but I imagine that it’s unfamiliar to some of our listeners. Could you just lay out the basics of OneTen?
Dyson: So OneTen is an organization that is focused on the skills-first movement. And what we’re doing is trying to unlock career opportunities for talent without a four-year degree. We have created a coalition committed to transform what I would say is the traditional way that companies have hired in the past.
Fuller: Now, Debbie, you had a long and distinguished career in the private sector, ended up a senior executive at ADP, which is obviously a human resources-oriented service provider. What drew you back into the workforce to take over OneTen when you were asked?
Dyson: I was hired straight out of college and went right into Corporate America at ADP and worked my way up to an executive position sitting with the C-suite, leading a large enterprise organization. And so after about 34 years, I felt like my work was done and said, “I’m going to go about my merry way and retire.” And I was five months, I’ll call it, into bliss, and then I got the call for a COO opportunity at OneTen. I knew exactly who OneTen was. ADP was part of this coalition. But the reason that it really compelled me, just to cut to the chase here, is that several years ago I lost my mother to complications of breast cancer, and she was quite the character, I would say. And so, as we knew she was unfortunately going to be moving on, she had left a note for me. It had said, “Look, I don’t know what the world’s going to look like years from now, and you’ve been blessed and grateful to have a lovely career. So whatever you do, please make sure that you are putting yourself in a place that you can give back to others that were not as fortunate as you.” Now, here comes a company that, for what she described, is exactly what you asked me to describe about OneTen. So it felt very intentional and very purposeful. This is how you give back, this is how you pay it forward. I was a kid that had a voice that was unheard. I did get an education, but I was sometimes unseen. So I don’t know, this felt like the perfect marriage, as we would say, to bring my passion, a wish for my mother, and something that I think can really make a difference all together as one.
Fuller: It sounds like your mother was like mine, and I would definitely not want to purposely disobey her, despite the fact that she’s been dead for 20-plus years. So I’d be scared she’d come back and give me a talking to. So, Debbie, you mentioned a couple of times that OneTen works in partnership with large companies like ADP. How does that work? What does OneTen do with them to advance your purpose and their objectives?
Dyson: The first thing that we try to do is really assess and understand what these large organizations are trying to do from a talent-acquisition perspective. So there’s an assessment of, call it the “health and readiness,” of an organization to absorb a mindset of “skills first.” The second thing is, we have a series of guidebooks, playbooks, tools, resources, a very robust ecosystem of partners and developers that are in our wheelhouse that help us understand what types of skills are required for the industries that all of these various companies represent. So we’re then trying to do a sizing of what’s actually available from a talent market perspective. Are the jobs that you’re currently looking for written in a manner that is appealing to talent that does not have a four-year degree? We call that “a little bit of recredentialing.” And then the last one, I think, is a biggie for me, and I think the companies appreciate this. It’s about evangelizing this message. We share and we communicate all of these outstanding companies that have said, “This work matters, and we’re part of that mission.” So we’re about brand elevation, helping them create communication—externally and even internally—because as you introduce something like this, it has to be embedded within their culture. So we try to help with that cultural evolution of embedding this type of work so that it just feels natural, not a bolt-on and a heavy lift that HR is forcing people to have to do something like that.
Fuller: Can you share with us some data about the type of impact OneTen has had to date and maybe an example of a couple of companies that have really embraced this three-pronged agenda you just went through and you think are performance leaders within the partnership population you’ve attracted?
Dyson: What we ask is as companies decide to make this journey and mission with us, we ask them to share the impact that they’re making within their company. How many individuals have you hired that do not have a four-year degree? How many individuals within your company do not have a degree and you promoted them to perhaps a more advanced position? So what they’re doing is, twice a year they share with us the impact of their hiring and promotion activities. To date, we have over 132,000 hires and promotes that we’ve done, which we’re very proud of. We do believe that there’s more opportunity obviously to elevate that. These are Fortune 500 companies. We’ve got Bank of America and JPMorgan. One of the very first case studies we did was Cleveland Clinic. This was in the height of the pandemic. People going into the health industry were fearful. And so Cleveland Clinic went through a whole, to me, evolution of rebranding themselves as a safe place to be and a great organization that, if you do not have a degree, you can get into the healthcare industry. There were great entry-level, great paying jobs at a clinic—and I think even more so, as we were initially focused on a community where people of color, it’s in Cleveland, had a fear of healthcare. So they created a lot of great programs with internships and apprenticeships, like on nurse practitioners, to really help them understand not only how to get in, but actually how to grow your career, as well. We then did another study with Delta Air Lines, who has been a massive proponent of this work. Their CEO, Ed Bastian, has really been an advocate for this work. He’s created very specific programs within Delta that have really embraced this, where it’s actually going deeper, even at the manager training level. So it can’t just be coming from the top with a pushdown, it’s how do your leaders embrace this? So he’s created leadership programs so that they’re part of the solution and empowering the leaders to have a voice to really make the impact. And then the last is Cisco. And Cisco has really had a lot of infrastructure. Most of what I said around Cleveland and Delta, I would call Cisco has the combination of all of that. So they’ve done things around setting a very vision in a pathway of why this work matters for their company. They then set a path of how they’ve empowered their leadership to lean in and be part of the solution in hiring the talent that really fits this skills-first mindset. They have the funding. These things, they require an infrastructure and a budget to really create the programs to have the success and impact. They have worked with the talent coming in. Tell us what worked, what was great about your hiring experience, where do we have opportunities so that it’s a repeatable, repetitive type of work and really gains the traction that I think they’re looking for. So those are three that I would highlight.
Fuller: Are the cases available on your website?
Dyson: Yeah, absolutely. Any of our surveys that we’ve done or insights that we’ve gathered, absolutely. So you can go much deeper. They’re pretty robust, and we’ve done those in partnership with HBS.
Fuller: In our conversation so far, you’ve been very disciplined about using the phrase “skills first,” as opposed to what I view as the more commonly used phrase “skills based.” Is that an important distinction?
Dyson: “Skills based” to me is the overall package. It’s the program itself. It you are looking to focus on using skills in your organization as a proxy for hiring, you need a program, and that program will be: What are the skills required for the job? What is the training required for the job? What are the partners that you need? “Skills first” to me is the discipline of how you would hire. And so what I’ve always said is that, when you are looking for talent, before you think about anything else, focus on the skills first, and then think about the rest of the elements that you need. Skills first does not necessarily mean that you do or do not have to have a degree. And I think people think that. “Oh, when you say ‘skills first,’ that means no degree.” No, what it’s saying is, “I’m looking at a resume. I want to know what are the skills that Joe is bringing to the table first. Then I’m going to look at the other things that maybe are important.” There may be a job that a degree is absolutely and most definitely necessary, but there could be another job that it isn’t. The distinction is, don’t eliminate talent by the degree, because it used to be the degree was first, and then you eliminated 66 percent of the candidates right out of the gate.
Fuller: I think it’s also really important when you mentioned Delta—which I view as an innovator pretty much across the board in their approach to talent acquisition and retention—investing in training managers. Certainly, our research here at HBS has indicated that, while there’s been quite a broad-based embrace of eliminating degree requirements in companies, in a lot of firms, that’s where it has ended. There’s no longer an absolute prohibition on hiring people without degrees. There’s a press release. It’s mentioned to the board of directors. Everyone’s feeling good about themselves. But unless you invest in helping the people making hiring decisions, in the parlance of personnel, the hiring manager, how to think differently, how to interview differently, how to assess resumes differently, you don’t get any pull-through, particularly in jobs that have always had college degree holders in the past, where the person doing the hiring probably has a college degree, their subordinates probably have college degrees, they’ve only interviewed college graduates in the past, and now you’re asking them to do something different and that’s unfamiliar. When OneTen was originally launched, it had an explicit focus on African Americans. And, of course, since its formation, we had the... Harvard was in the news in a way we’d prefer not to be, which is, we were a defendant in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, which became the basis for the Supreme Court decision that significantly constrained the use of affirmative action in all sorts of decision making, including extending that logic to companies. How has that affected your activities, and how do you think it’s going to affect the way your partners, these large companies, are approaching hiring?
Dyson: Yeah, I think if I just take a step back, we’ve been in existence for about four years, and we came during the height of a series of unfortunate tragedies leading to the murder of George Floyd, which is what prompted our existence. Skills-first had been around pre any of that, but there was just a heightened sense of concern, what was happening to our nation. You had big companies coming together, “What can we do?” And the conversation led to, “We can create jobs, we can create opportunities for talent.” And to your point, the original mission was for Black talent without four-year degrees. To your point, in June 2023, July, when the ruling came out from the Supreme Court, and it affected the college admissions piece of it, there was a realization that we wanted to be clear that our intention was never to exclude anyone. While our focus was on Black talent, we were never turning away any talent that said, “Can you help us?” So what we did at the time, Joe, was we added in, “Hey, this is for Black talent and others; it’s for anyone that we can help.” So we were trying to be clear. However, fast-forwarding, to your point, the world has continued to evolve. There started to be more scrutiny around certain DE&I practices. And so our mission, as noted, as we talked right at the beginning, is about focusing on unlocking career opportunities for all talent without a four-year degree using skills first as the driver to help unlock those opportunities. That’s the change. For companies, it is allowing them the freedom to operate more safely without feeling as though there’s a target, for a lack of a better word. That somebody is looking to find, “Hey, you’re doing something where you’re not allowing others to participate in this initiative or this program or this movement,” and our work doesn’t do that. So what I think I would say to you is, we’ve heard pretty consistently from our organizations, almost a relief, this work will help everyone. Sixty-six percent of Americans do not have a four-year degree. Seventy-two percent are people of color. So just by proxy, you’re going to help who you need to help. Look, it’s not for everybody. It’s not, I’ll just be very clear. Some are like, “We’re not comfortable.” That’s okay. This is why we call it a coalition. It’s a coalition of like-minded individuals that are fighting for a mission together. These are like-minded CEOs, CHROs, CDOs, et cetera, really putting their heads together and fighting for voices, again, that just have not been seen, understood, or represented en masse.
Fuller: A constant in most of our research at the Managing the Future of Work research project has been that often initiatives like this, yes, the companies are doing something that they believe to be good and their incumbent workers believe to be good, but it’s also a highly logical, clear-eyed, hard-nosed business decision. As you alluded to earlier, the U.S. workforce is essentially stagnant. Over time, it’s getting more diverse, since birth rates in minority communities are higher than in Caucasian communities. And workforce participation has been lackluster in the United States for quite some time. So companies need to open the aperture on how they’re hiring and where they’re hiring, if only to make sure they have an adequate supply of candidates going forward.
Dyson: Yes. Six or seven generations are actually working. You’ve never really had that. And each of those generations need something very, very different. The talent tends to be a little bit on the younger range—probably in that 28 to 32. However, what’s interesting is, where we see most of the gap is in the older generation, because it was the old practices that eliminated that worker; they’re 40 or 50 years old, and they were already eliminated. So that worker is still out there fighting to be seen and trying to get a [good] job, even though they’ve been working for 20 or 30 years. And so there’s a bit of, how do you attack both ends of the spectrum—the worker that’s a bit older that has excluded because they don’t have a degree, or the new worker that, for whatever the reason is, didn’t have the opportunity to go to school, whether it was a financial or personal decision, what have you. But the other thing that we have to be careful or mindful of is, with the use of AI, this becomes even more risky, because if people are doing the resume scraping more in an automated manner, and in your scraping you’re likely to eliminate anybody without a degree, it could become even more challenged, versus a human looking at it. This is about disrupting. It’s disrupting a traditional way. You were making your comments about the manager. If you don’t change that mindset, this work won’t move. This isn’t about the CEO saying, “Go do this.” This is about helping managers see what the value of hiring workers with all sorts of diversity and skill sets, regardless of degree, can allow you an opportunity to expand your pool of candidates.
Fuller: It really does require a root-and-branch type of change, because the systems large companies use to hire are very, very refined, and they really designed to maximize the efficiency of the process. As you know, in our research, we identified roughly 25 million Americans who are, we call them “hidden workers,” who are essentially largely screened out of consideration for most positions by the front end, the AI-driven front end of the applicant tracking systems that companies rely on to take a large pool of applicants and winnow it down to a small pile of candidates. Interestingly, the biggest population in that 25 million subpopulation are people who are working part time. So it’s not that they’re on the fringe of the labor market, they’re in the labor market, they want to convert to full-time work, but the AI looks at their application and says, “You’re a part-time worker in the food service industry or the hospitality business or whatnot, and I’m looking for someone who’s got either a credential or a degree” or some other marker that’s simple for the technology to identify. Really the whole system is tuned to eliminate candidates as quickly as possible, as opposed to broaden the aperture, which is what we are, in fact, going to need going forward.
Dyson: I agree completely. You mentioned the middle managers that I think are key to all of this, and to what you said as well, we’ve surveyed these managers and said, “Do you believe in this work?” And the answer is resounding, “Yes, absolutely. Skills first.” It’s like 90-something percent from the survey that we conducted said, “Yes, skills first is necessary.” But then when we asked the follow-up question of, “Are you hiring for it?” the percentages dropped significantly, with something like 30 percent said, “Yeah, but we’re not able to hire.” But what started to become another factor, which is interesting, was, “Okay, we’re looking at skills. They have the technical skills, but we’re not sure about their soft skills or their durable skills,” with the assumption or the proxy being that, if you go to school, perhaps you’re learning those types of skills. So we’ve tried to be more proactive at OneTen to anticipate that. And what we’ve done is created our own branded soft-skills assessment, so that when we are identifying great talent, we can say, “Not only does Debbie have the skills for that job, we’ve assessed what her soft-skill capability is.” And so the precision of matching for the technical and the soft has elevated with our ability to deliver, I’ll call it, a “complete” candidate.
Fuller: I think that’s very important. Anything we can do to credentialize soft skills or social skills, because it’s easy to check hard-skills credentials, and it’s easy to do confirmation testing, aptitude testing, in hard skills. You either know how to weld or you don’t. You either have an AWS certificate or you don’t. Whether or not you can go into an unfamiliar group of colleagues or go meet a customer for a first time and not get shy and bashful and look at your shoes for the entire meeting, that’s not something that’s easily done relying on the types of markers that we’ve relied on in the labor market, historically. We did an analysis of job descriptions in the tech sector a couple of years ago—I did it in conjunction with Matt Sigelman at the Burning Glass Institute—of what changed in job descriptions after the college degree requirement was eliminated, and there was a noticeable infusion of additional language that were all about social skills. So I think that reliance on the college degree as a proxy for maturity, having a more refined communications ability, resilience, stick-to-itiveness, ability to learn, willingness to learn was caught in that change. Of course, this becomes all the more important as technology becomes more capable, because what are the tasks left in a job—if AI is doing a lot of the historically technical tasks in that job—which leaves our ability to interact with others, and that’s a social skill.
Dyson: You know what I think is exciting as well, as we’ve talked a lot about how we’re helping the employer think about the language that they use. To your point, they’re inserting language around soft skills in their job description. If I flip it the other way, what excites me from the talent side is, we’re going to get to a place where we can help talent almost prepare in advance perhaps the right pathway. Because remember as I was saying, we’re looking to unlock career pathways. So think about it this way: We have the ability through Bureau of Labor Statistics or other unemployment reports that come out that can tell you, “Here’s the market that’s in demand.” Let’s just use the healthcare one. We can say, “For healthcare, these are the technical skills that you need: X, Y, and Z.” And at the same time, we can say, “For that job, these are the durable or the soft skills that you need also.” So if I am a new worker or whoever, and I’m interested in either getting into that field or changing, you can assess me right up front to say, “Debbie, if you’re interested in healthcare, while you have these soft skills, you’re lacking these technical,” or vice versa. So I think that’s where the power of this work on both sides of the spectrum can help talent understand where they’re the best fit, and it can help companies identify who is the best fit. Look, at the end of the day, and we haven’t spoken a lot about this, this is good for business. It’s beyond the obvious of good for business from diversity and representation and different voices. You’re getting a more productive worker. They were specifically trained for that task, they come out swinging and the ability to produce faster with better production and better quality. So it’s a real full circle, which I think is something that’s unique to me in this market that I haven’t seen in my history of being in this human capital, where you’re trying to get both sides to meet, talent and the employer—best fit all around.
Fuller: It’s critical that really the employers are not just invited to the table. They have to be integral to this, because a lot of thinking that’s been done in the education sector about pathways are, how do you get a successful—or any—education to employment transition. A lot of entry-level jobs that are available to people—particularly people that have modest educational attainment, are young, maybe are students in an underperforming K–12 system—are really jobs that they’re not at the bottom of a career path that leads to high income. They’re really often high-turnover, low-wage jobs that don’t give you more skills, that give your resume more value in the labor market. And so having companies there thinking about pathways that extend over the life of someone’s career or term with the company and that there are... Not everyone gets promoted, but there are paths beyond into that first job, but further up the organization. Then you’re talking about skills-based advancement logic, whether that advancement is for a brand new worker or drawing on rich—and usually more diverse than not—lower levels of your organization to build the internal talent pipelines.
Dyson: No, absolutely. Again, that’s why I said the power of what this can do isn’t just about identifying the new worker that’s coming in. It helps you identify the existing worker in your company and helping put them on a different pathway that is more sustainable. For this work to occur, it has to be embedded on, “This is just who we are, this is just how we operate, this is just how we hire.” When you put that label, “This is an initiative,” it has a lifespan. An initiative is like, “We’re going to do this for a year, and then we will table it, and we’ll move on to the next thing.” This is how we do our work. This is how we hire. And so the retention and sustainability to help the new worker coming in and the existing worker see the potential and pathway for success or a more family-sustaining type wage, I think is important. Important for our nation and important for us to give back.
Fuller: So as we are here, holiday season in late 2024, what can we expect to see from OneTen in 2025 and beyond?
Dyson: Look, the future for me is all about transformation. I think we have set a foundation of great insights that we’ve learned since our inception fed by the companies that we’ve been working with. We’ve got an incredibly robust ecosystem of talent developers and partners that have leaned into this work that are learning. And we’re all growing together. So to me, as I look at 2025, I see our ability to help companies further elevate their ability to find the best fit for their organization. I see the ability to really ground ourselves in a common language, a common footprint, to help those leaders really lean into this work and help them see the value. And I do think the bigger thing is the impact. How do we really educate and share the value and the impact and show results? Tell the stories? Hear from the talent? We have on our site as well stories upon stories, they are so inspirational, of people that almost gave up hope and didn’t see that there was a future and got hired by a Cisco, a Delta, or a Cleveland Clinic, and now can say, “Not only did I gain skills, I can provide for my family,” and it’s breaking up a generational trend and putting them on a very, very different path. So, to me, 2025 is continuing that transformation and getting more companies, more talent, more partners to really lean in and evangelize this so that we can share the impact of the work and address this shortage of labor, the shortage of jobs and opportunities.
Fuller: Debbie Dyson, CEO of OneTen, a leader in the skills-first movement in the United States, thanks for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.
Dyson: Thank you so much, Joe, for having me. Really appreciate it.
Fuller: You bet. 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.