Joe Fuller: It’s mid-2026, and demand for workers in the skilled trades continues to outstrip supply. Yet training programs are producing candidates who still struggle to get hired. That points to a breakdown in how skills are recognized—and the limits of conventional resumes in this context.

Welcome to the Managing 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. I’m pleased to welcome Darnell Epps, founder and CEO of Thurgood Industries, to the podcast. Thurgood provides a platform for students in vocational and technical programs to showcase their skills through portfolios of real work. This helps employers spot talent earlier and recruit more effectively. Darnell followed a unique path to this work. After dropping out of high school and spending time in prison, he earned his GED, graduated from Cornell University, and went on to Yale Law School. While at Yale, he also enrolled in a vocational training program. That experience led him to focus on how workers can better demonstrate what they can actually do. We’ll talk about making skills visible, improving hiring outcomes, and expanding access to durable careers. Darnell, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Darnell Epps: Thanks for having me.

Fuller: Darnell, tell us a little bit about your background and how you developed an interest in opportunity employment pathways—mechanisms to get more people who are on the margins of work fully engaged, not just in the workforce, but in jobs that have a future, pay a household sustaining wage.

Epps: It’s really through lived experience. I grew up in NYCHA, New York City Public Housing in the 1990s. I dropped out in the 10th grade. And you could look at the statistics. Any inner-city youth at that time who dropped out of high school was likely to have some contact with the criminal legal system. And I did as a young adult. I was incarcerated at the age of 20. And I spent quite a long time in prison, 17 years to be exact, before eventually being released. And it was there that I took my first college course. I earned my general equivalency diploma early on, but with the advantages offered by the pilot called Second Chance Pell, I was able to participate in some college programming while incarcerated. I later matriculated at Cornell University. I earned a bachelor’s degree in government and minored in law and society. I always had an interest in opportunity pathways for people who live in communities that historically have been underserved or stricken with poverty. I think of my grandfather, who came up during the early part of the Great Migration. He fought in World War II. He didn’t benefit from the GI Bill in the way that white veterans had. And he had to live in New York City public housing, Walt Whitman houses, which is now gentrified by the way. So I always had tremendous sympathy for people growing up in communities that resembled the one that I grew up in. And I wanted to create opportunities for them because not everyone is going to end up at Cornell or Yale. And we’ve got to create dignified pathways for everybody.

Fuller: Let’s talk a little bit about your experience at Yale, but it is sobering your data about high school non-completers and the demographics of outcomes for them because as we all know, there’s really been an attendance crisis in the aftermath of Covid with a lot of young people. And I shudder at the thought that, as they start getting to employment age, how well prepared they’ll be, especially given the dynamism in skills requirements that we’re seeing in today’s economy. But you went on after Cornell to go to the Yale Law School, but at the same time, or during your time at Yale, you enrolled in Lincoln Tech, which is a skills-oriented vocational school. Tell us about that choice, and what motivated you and what did you learn from it?

Epps: Yeah, that goes back to opportunity pathways. I was doing work with Professor James Forman, Jr., with the Law and Racial Justice Center. I was focused on providing free legal training to people in underserved communities. But what that did was, it brought me face to face with many folks who were working in the gig economy. New Haven, itself, is economically stratified. At the time—you’re talking about 2022—there was a 26 percent poverty rate and a median household income of $42,000. And so many of the folks I was meeting were looking for jobs that paid above a living wage. And I also read a report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute indicating that some 2.1 million jobs were expected to go unfilled due to an existing skills gap. And there was a deficit of some 700,000 or actually 650,000 skilled construction jobs at that time. And Connecticut was—and is—a huge manufacturing hub with companies like Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, or Sikorsky. And these companies were looking to fill tens of thousands of entry-level positions. At the time I met with talent acquisition at Sikorsky, I believe they just had the contract for the CH-54 chopper with the DoD, and they were hiring over 100 entry-level machinists who the jobs paid above $30 an hour. So these were great careers that I thought other people should have exposure to. People in communities with a hunger for an economic opportunity at its greatest. So I knew little in terms of skills about manufacturing. I wasn’t even the most handyman around my own house—my wife could tell you. So I decided to really understand those skills in a deeper way and immerse myself in this problem. I call it anthro-entrepreneurial—I put myself in the actual space to really understand it at a deeper level. This is a time when VR and augmented reality was the big thing. Maybe we could use augmented reality to train people to fill some of these positions. But ultimately I wasn’t convinced due to some of the shortcomings of the actual hardware. But one insight I took away from my experience at Lincoln Tech was that there was very little in terms of bridges between students who were very talented and employers. Employers were looking to hire talent that they said they couldn’t find, and employees were looking to have a better way to make their skills more visible to employers.

Fuller: So, Darnell, you went on to start an organization called Thurgood Industries off of these insights you developed. Tell us a little about that. And I’m also curious about the name. Is it an homage to the legendary Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall? What was the motivation to start it and what were the considerations you weighed in deciding to create an organization to advance people into these jobs you were just describing?

Epps: Yeah. To answer your question, yes, Thurgood Marshall, my idol, I named our company after him. He stood for the right to industrial self-determination. I felt like what better way to capture our mission. He was someone who was a legal engineer, I consider a legal engineer. He spearheaded the arguments in Brown v. Board to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. And I have tremendous respect for what he stood for. His jurisprudence, his writings all speak to that question of equality for all. Now, yeah, I landed my first job as a qualitative researcher when I graduated from Cornell using a tool called Handshake. There was no similar tool available to students in vocational schools or CTE schools or any of the career schools that I was visiting. I felt like students’ job prospects shouldn’t be limited to a career fair. However many local employers show up, that shouldn’t be all students are limited to. And I also felt like students—the young woman who can out-weld the internet—you’ll never know that from a resume. You’ll never know that from a resume that they upload on Indeed. So what better way to honor the dignity of her craft or her work than to give her a platform that makes her skills more legible to employers? So students don’t rely on a single document to find a job. Students rely on a portfolio of projects, video, other media that they upload and build a robust profile that’s visible to employers who want to source talent, entry-level talent.

Fuller: So, Darnell, let’s talk about how you built the platform. What are the attributes of the platform that you thought were necessary to advance people’s interests? And I will just comment that Garrett Lord, who’s CEO of Handshake, was a guest on the podcast. For those of our audience that aren’t familiar with Handshake, it’s a mechanism to get college students, particularly, introduced to internship and job opportunities, trying to augment the career development offices and job placement offices of universities. But you mentioned that creating a mechanism for having that woman welder or machinist be able to demonstrate that she has those skills. What are the other attributes that you wanted to build into Thurgood’s offer so that you would build that bridge between candidates and employers looking for all this missing talent?

Epps: So there’s the job seeker of student experience, which is a mobile first app. And students have the convenience of using their phones to snap pictures, photos, and make a video of projects that they can upload to their profile, as well as a jobs board and other social features that you would see on any other platform like LinkedIn or Instagram—except this is for the purpose primarily of finding a job. We do have a community feed where students can connect with their peers, they can comment on each other’s work. And that was really inspired to bring dignity to this space, because there’s always been a stigma about blue-collar work, about working with your hands. Five years ago, working as an HVAC technician wasn’t looked at as a plausible alternative to college, unfortunately. That attitude is shifting a bit. But we wanted to give students a space where they can celebrate their craft, and we wanted to create an aspirational pull for doing great work in this space. The second part is a career operating system that we provide to schools for free, a career OS that schools do not have to pay for. Schools can onboard all their local employers to the platform, track student engagement, get verifications, and have access to other tools that create efficiencies in job placement and student engagement. And we realized that we had to, in order to really build out a community in this space and build out the bridge that I had mentioned, we had to become part of the central workflow of schools. So we have one career portal integration that went live with Lincoln Technical Institute on September 29th that spans some 23 campuses providing access to over 20,000 students. If you were to download the app today, open up the community feed, you’d see some remarkable production behind some of the posts that students are sharing. That’s the school experience, the career portal integration and then employers have access to their own dashboard.

Fuller: So let’s talk about the employer experience and how did you come to understand what employers would find useful? And how does that show up in their dashboard and in your vision for how to evolve the evolution of the upstream data to make it ever more valuable to employers in sorting through candidates and identifying talent?

Epps: Yeah. I mean, just on the employer dashboard, the fact that they can see actual student projects in itself is a way to gauge whether students are enthusiastic about their work, the level of pride they take in their work, which does speak to retention and whether or not this is someone who’s looking for a career. We engaged in a design partnership with Cox Automotive in 2025, and we would meet in Atlanta, we’d meet with their hiring managers and their head of marketing. And we realized quickly that there were two needs here. Employers, they needed both mid- and senior-level technicians. They needed entry-level technicians, but sometimes employers just didn’t have the capacity to invest in a training apparatus for those entry-level technicians and they were more concerned with looking for the more experienced ones. Given the scarcity of talent in this space, employers—like Cox Automotive, like Crash Champions, who’s a current sponsor of students on our platform—they wanted to get in front of the next generation of talent, and they were willing to tap into their marketing budgets in order to do that. Even if they weren’t ready to hire, they still wanted increased brand visibility with this next generation of talent. And it’s much easier to tap into marketing budgets than it is to tap into HR budgets, which are much more heavily scrutinized. Companies are spending roughly less than 1 percent from the HR budget and roughly 5 percent of their annual revenue on marketing. So it allowed us to engage with employers even when they didn’t have immediate hiring needs at the entry level. Employers were willing to pay for that opportunity.

Fuller: How do you think that employers are measuring their interaction with programs like yours? What are the metrics they’re using to determine whether or not this is really a good avenue for finding talent?

Epps: Lower cost per hire. Crash Champions, one of our biggest sponsors to date, is seeing record recruitment and lower cost per hire. The SHRM [Society for Human Resource Management] benchmark for recruiting a single entry-level hire today is roughly $4,700. We’ve reduced that by 70 percent for Crash Champions, just based on that partnership.

Fuller: And what metrics are you continuing to track yourself to look for opportunities to improve Thurgood’s offers and to make sure that you’re in sync between the learner’s objectives and your improving understanding of what the employers are looking for?

Epps: Yeah. In addition to interviews and hires, we’re also tracking student posts. How many students are actually sharing their work, right? How many students are clicking on jobs? How many students are using the Near Field Communication Cards that are sponsored by employers at these career fairs that they so frequently attend. I think over 90 percent of vocational schools today rely on career fairs to connect their students with job opportunities.

Fuller: Darnell, tell me about these Near Field cards, what are those?

Epps: Yeah, so it’s more like a white-glove experience for employers who want to engage with embedded talent pipelines. In addition to having access to a sponsored dashboard where Crash Champions, for example, has access to every single collision repair and finishing student across Lincoln Tech’s 23 campuses. All of those students are given what’s called a Near Field Communication Card, we call them NFC cards for short. And those are basically digital business cards. If you’ve ever seen someone with it, they tap your phone, and maybe it’s synced with their LinkedIn, maybe it’s synced with their Instagram. It’s a way of passing off contact information through smartphones. But we distribute sponsored cards on behalf of employers like Crash Champions, and they’re targeted to specific cohorts of students who are in the trades that they’re looking to recruit from. And we capture the analytics from student use of those cards at career fairs. It’s synced with their Thurgood account, and they use the cards to give campus recruiters candidate snapshots of their portfolio. So if I tap your phone today, Joe, you would see a candidate snapshot of all the projects I’ve worked on at Lincoln Tech as a machinist. It makes it so that these conversations at these career fairs aren’t fleeting, they’re not short-lived, and that something substantive is left with a campus recruiter. Those campus recruiters may not even have a Thurgood company account, but yet they can save that student’s contact information in their work portfolio. So it’s a way of sharing work. And it’s something that lives with them even after they graduate. They could continue to add posts to their profile, and it’s all captured in that card. And it’s branded with the company sponsor’s logo on it.

Fuller: Let me talk about both sides of this market. We’ve got what would be traditionally called skills providers, usually going to be educational institutions. It could be a Lincoln Tech or it could be a community college, could be even a four-year program, and then we’ve got the employers. What’s been your experience in terms of the receptivity of those skills providers to a program like Thurgood Industries? Have you found skills providers open to this? And how are you explaining the value that Thurgood provides to advance their sense of mission, as opposed to merely the experience of an individual learner?

Epps: We just demoed the platform at Purdue In-MaC [The Indiana Manufacturing Competitiveness Center] and met with folks from the Toyota Academy, Ivy Tech, and many high schools in the state of Indiana, and they love the platform. Lincoln Tech loves the platform. They love the ability of students to showcase their actual skills. That portfolio-building approach is something schools are very receptive to. They understand the value of it. Many schools already have a marketing staff member at their campuses that is responsible for taking snapshots of student projects and then posting it on the campus accounts’ Instagram. But there’s no system in place that really connects the actual skills that are on display there to job opportunities and to employers. That’s more for promoting the school. We’re focused on promoting the student. And obviously schools have accreditation needs. They need to place 70 percent or more of their students in the field. And many schools want to be at 95 percent placement. They want to even go higher, they want to be 100 percent on the placement side. So they see Thurgood as an additional tool, frictionless tool. We don’t charge schools. That’s not how we generate our revenue. Our platform and our network, our growing network of tens of thousands of students, is not dependent entirely on career portal integrations. Yes, we’re integrated with career portals, both at the high school level and at the post-secondary level, but our Near Field Communication Cards were designed as a way to map out student cohorts. We just met with Siemens Energy. They’re looking to recruit entry-level technicians in Charlotte and in Florida.

Fuller: Indiana is consistently one of the leading states in this area. Going back to Governor Mitch Daniels, Governor Pence, Governor Holcomb, each has been really at the forefront as governors. And Ivy Tech’s one of the elite community college systems. So if they’re enthusiastic, that’s just a great test of your value proposition. Let’s go to the employer side for a second. You’ve talked a little bit about getting through the hiring process. But now there’s the onboarding process, and there’s the getting someone settled into a job. The history of skills-based hiring over the last five years, according to our research at the Managing the Future of Work Project, is pretty uneven. A lot of employers have taken a bold public stance that they want to shift to skills-based hiring. But when you look at the actual uptake and change in hiring patterns, it’s pretty modest. What’s your observation, and particularly about what are the follow-on practices post the hiring decisions that help these qualified candidates you’re presenting them with get in role, start being a success, and build a performance management profile in the company, which means the deal’s really sealed, that they’re going to stay, that the opportunity has been realized for both the worker and the employer.

Epps: Yeah. And I mean, this comes back, I think, in some ways to the question of soft skills—leadership qualities, goal setting, communication skills, emotional intelligence, enthusiasm about your craft. These are all questions that can speak to the issue of retention. Is this someone who’s going to stay for 10, 15, 20 years? My argument is that that’s visible in the portfolios that students share. You know that they have initiative, they have excitement and enthusiasm about their craft, and that these are people you should invest in, that they’re going to stay long-term at your company and they’re going to be good. They love what they do. I think a problem that employers face when they hire someone based solely on a resume, straight out of trade school, straight out of community college is some people can fake it through school. Some people can pass. And everybody looks the same. This gives insight into students’ abilities, into those soft skills that I mentioned that otherwise doesn’t exist, that you will not get on any other platform. And that is the argument I would make about why Thurgood is so incredible at addressing that later issue of retention.

Fuller: What is it that you are observing that employers do post-hire to really up those chances of retention? Because you used the metric earlier of cost per hire, which is a widespread and really important metric. But we find that something that employers don’t spend as much time on is the cost of turnover, the cost of losing someone you’ve already decided to employ, and that they can take steps early in the employment history to raise the chances of that employee both feeling successful and actually being successful. Are you observing things that employers can do to help guarantee the gains they’re seeking once they’ve got someone on their payroll?

Epps: Investing in their workforce and ensuring that they understand that their career path isn’t static, it’s not limited, that they can grow within the company. And that could be by having a robust tuition reimbursement program. If you’re a machinist at Monti or you’re a machinist at Snap-on Tools—and maybe you want to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering, you want to work more on the engineering side—having a program in place that workers are familiar with and can see the trajectory of their own growth from the start of their employment, I think is vital. I think also having an understanding early on as a worker as to what the career trajectory for you can look like at a company. I’ll give an example that doesn’t involve tuition reimbursement. Crash Champions, for example, have a mentorship program. So when you make it from Tech I to Tech III, you can qualify to be a mentor for other Tech I's and apprentices. And you can earn an additional $19,000 a year on top of your base salary, which is already six figures. When students hear about that early on, they get much more interested in a career at Crash Champions. They want to know the culture. They want to know what the long-term benefit is of staying with the company. They want to grow with the company. You have to help those entry-level technicians understand that this is something that can change their lives in the long term. And they could achieve the American dream because I think that’s what everybody wants to do.

Fuller: You mentioned the financing of training. And you previously mentioned that you are a beneficiary of Second Chance Pell. A lot of our listeners will be familiar with the Pell program, which is part of the federal system for supporting workers in different categories. The classic Pell grants relate to income level, but there are specific programs like Second Chance Pell, which you mentioned earlier. We now have a new experiment called Workforce Pell. And it’s the first time we’ve had this. It’s a reasonably modest program in terms of size, certainly relative to the overall spending of the federal government on tuition support. Are you beginning to see Workforce Pell? Are conversations beginning to happen about how Workforce Pell might play into the career paths that you’re supporting? Are you optimistic? And what’s got to happen for this thing to take off?

Epps: I am optimistic. There’s going to be more of a need to capture data that ensures that students who use those Workforce Pell dollars are actually finding or getting placed in careers that pay well above what they otherwise would’ve earned had they just pursued employment straight out of high school. Some of these funds want to see 15 percent increase in what the average wage would be. So Thurgood is a platform that is primed to do some of that measuring. And we’re kind of tailoring our platform to ensure that those outcomes are seen on behalf of students who are utilizing those Workforce Pell dollars. So it’s still very early.

Fuller: Darnell, do you see other areas of policy that if you could wave a magic wand and cause there to be a couple of other changes that would accelerate the ability of people to get on and move up these pathways to really good-paying employment that will support household formation and economic independence? Are there other policy domains that you say, if only that were different. Are there a couple that come to mind?

Epps: I mean, the first one I would think of, we’re working with the PHCC [Plumbing Heating Cooling Contractors Association] in the state of Indiana, who not only to connect high schoolers to apprenticeship with their member companies, but also people impacted by the jail system. And I was a beneficiary of Second Chance Pell while incarcerated. I think we need to explore ways to ensure that Workforce Pell is used for people who are currently incarcerated as well to help funnel them into some of these jobs. I also think we need more Second Chance employers in the manufacturing space, and a lot are, but when you think about roles where you need security clearance, or if you’re working at Sikorsky or Electric Boat, those jobs seem out of the way for many of the folks who are incarcerated. Now, when you’re incarcerated, you’re always taking some kind of vocational training program, but there’s not much there in terms of dollars or a policy structure that can help create pathways for returning citizens to pursue some of these careers. These are the next-generation jobs, really—being an HVAC technician at a data center, working as an electrical apprentice—and we need to realize that being too selective and excluding a lot of talented people who, like myself, may have made some poor choices and found themselves impacted by the jail system or the prison system is not a wise approach. If we’re going to fortify our manufacturing base, we’re going to bring manufacturing back to the states and really compete on a geopolitical level and de-risk supply chains and all that good stuff, we really have to start investing in people. And that starts with not just working with people who are in schools, but also working with those populations of people who will be returning from prison and jail and finding ways to provide them with the training opportunities. And if that’s leveraging workforce Pell dollars to get more programs on the inside.

Fuller: I think some of our listeners may not be well versed in the data. They’d be surprised here that more than almost 80 million Americans have an arrest record. They’d be probably even more surprised to hear that almost 40 percent of people who are judicially impacted and are released from the prison system have no employment in their first year, and that recidivism rates—getting back involved in the judicial system—almost always from deeply negative consequences, is very highly related to whether you’re steadily employed in your first year back in the community and how much you make. That recidivism rates for people making $0 to $7 an hour are 12 to 14 percent higher than those who are making $7 to $10 an hour, and those are 10 percent higher than those people who are making $10 or more an hour. So it really shows how employability and the ability to get back on your feet and begin to build a stable life based on a living wage is integral to this. So one final question, Darnell. I mean, Thurgood is still a young institution, you’re still a fairly recent, a little bit, maybe, more mature entrepreneur. What can we hope to hear from you and see out of Thurgood in the next several years? How are you measuring success and what are your ambitions for Thurgood Industries?

Epps: Yeah, our goal is to scale the platforms and our career OS to more schools. We’re in talks with Lone Star. We’re in talks with several more high schools in the state of Indiana. We want tens of thousands of more students on the platform, engaged posting. We want to build that community that I mentioned earlier that creates an aspirational pull toward careers in these spaces that brings dignity to the craftmanship that we see on a daily basis. And we want to be the go-to platform for entry-level blue-collar workers in America. That’s our goal. That’s our goal, is to have not just tens of thousands, but millions of skilled workers on a platform in five years, helping them not just find jobs, but build community. And that’s the north star of our platform.

Fuller: No, that’s a great bold aspiration. And your whole life history is one of making changes and really accomplishing things that many people would not have given you the benefit of the doubt that you’d be able to do. So in your particular instance, I think my listeners and I will be not only rooting for you, but not betting against you fulfilling an ambition like that, particularly when I hear also you’re engaging with Lone Star, which is an elite performing community college in the Houston area where they’ve got a lot of outstanding community colleges like San Jacinto and others. So you’re swimming in the deep end of the pool with really great institutions and partners, and that’s a great endorsement of what you’re trying to achieve at Thurgood Industries. Such a pleasure to welcome you to our podcast, Darnell, and we’re looking forward to watching how things unfold for you.

Epps: Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be here and huge fan of the podcast, so glad I could contribute in a way that’s meaningful.

Fuller: 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.