When Passion Meets Purpose

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Audrey Mickahail: One of the things that is really ripe for re-examination are those screening-out mechanisms, the right way to go about talent acquisition. We would argue looking at the skills they do have rather than the credential they don't have is a far more effective way to go about a skills-based talent acquisition hiring process.

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Jill Finlayson: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast with Berkeley Extension and EDGE in Tech at the University of California, focused on expanding diversity and gender equity in tech. EDGE in Tech is part of CITRIS, the Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society, and the Banatao Institute. UC Berkeley Extension is the continuing education arm of the University of California at Berkeley.

Millions of Americans entering the workforce don't have a traditional four-year college degree. Earning a degree may not be realistic, attainable, or appealing for everyone. Many folks are, instead, pursuing alternative educational paths, from on-the-job training to certificates to advance their careers.

The traditional four-year degree is only one way to demonstrate needed work skills. But are the prospective employers feeling the same way?

We continue to see the bachelor's degree as a requirement for many job listings, and so AI-enabled resume readers will screen out otherwise capable applicants. How can we tear down this paper ceiling and create more pathways for professional development and faster skills growth without the time and financial investment college requires for workers, who may already have equivalent work experience?

To discuss this important topic, we're delighted to speak with Audrey Mickahail at Opportunity at Work, where she is responsible for developing the strategy, documenting research-based best practices, and, ultimately, helping organizations realize their ability to recruit, value, and advance STARs. STARs are talented individuals skilled through alternative routes, rather than the bachelor's degree.

Before joining Opportunity at Work, Audrey built a corporate advisory practice at Jobs for the Future, which is focused on equitable talent practices and social impact strategies. She was previously senior director at research and consulting firm Gartner. Welcome, Audrey.

Audrey Mickahail: Thank you so much, Jill. I'm so delighted to be here with you.

Jill Finlayson: You've been researching equity and access to jobs in a number of ways. Can you tell me a little bit about how you ended up at Opportunity at Work, and what was your pathway?

Audrey Mickahail: Absolutely. And it was, in its own way, a little bit alternative. So I'd love to start by just saying that one of the things that I've had the privilege of doing throughout my career is to continue to learn, to continue to get trained myself.

And it was through a long career in the corporate advisory space that I understood and really got to learn quite a bit about how practice change happens. I got to observe it throughout my career, understand the fundamentals of how really large, complex enterprises struggle and ultimately implement change, but what is hard about it, and what it takes to actually get that work done.

And it was that training and experience that led me to jobs for the future and then later Opportunity at Work, because my personal passion was trying to find ways to address economic inequality in this country. And I felt as though I had the great privilege of having investment in me and my skill building throughout my career.

And I've certainly seen how some folks get those opportunities, but not everyone does. Some folks, myself included, get the opportunity to have bets made on them and on their not necessarily demonstrated skill, but potential. I certainly have been the beneficiary of that, and I just want to see that opportunity get expanded to a broader array of very skilled and talented folks who may not have the pedigree, but certainly have the skill if given access and opportunity.

Jill Finlayson: And what inspired you to even identify this as an area for work?

Audrey Mickahail: Well, I had the great privilege of learning alongside, and hopefully, in certain circumstances, teaching executives. And I loved that work, because it gave me an opportunity to continue learning each and every day and to see what change could look like and yet all the obstacles that folks face when trying to enact change.

But what I understood by being a sentient being in our country today was that it's one thing to support executives who are incredibly important people that we rely on, but that my opportunity, and where I wanted to bring that skill set again, was to folks who perhaps were not in the c-suite. And so I was really looking for opportunities to bring not just the notion of change, but change with purpose to a broader array of organizations and a broader array of challenges. And the one that just spoke to me based on, frankly, the reality of opportunity in this country over the last 40 or so years, was one of expanding economic opportunity for Americans.

Jill Finlayson: When you talk about STARs, or people who are using these alternative pathways, describe what are the types of people that fall into those categories. How many people are we talking about in the workforce?

Audrey Mickahail: So, Jill, this is the thing that I think was such an a-ha moment for me, was when I realized, as a hiring manager, that I never examined the implication personally of requiring a bachelor's degree in a job description. I have a bachelor's degree, and I very much overestimated the proportion of the American workforce that also has a bachelor's degree. I, frankly, took it for granted.

I live in the Washington DC area. It is a very credentialed part of the country. And I'll admit I was in a bit of a bubble. Of the 140 million workers who are active in the American labor market today, fully half-- 70 million-- of them are STARs, or workers who are skilled through alternative routes.

And that means they have gained skill through short-term credential programs or boot camps. They have military service. They've gone to community college, or they've learned their skills the same way everyone learns skills-- on the job, showing up every day, doing the work.

And so I think the important thing to recognize here is that the skill development is something that we have, perhaps, underappreciated. And the college degree, for a long time, has been a somewhat easy proxy for that skill development. And I think one of our core parts of our mission and the core argument for us is that it is a hack that is broken, and it's worth reexamining.

Jill Finlayson: So to recap, you said 140 million workers, fully half of them-- 70 million-- have not got a bachelor's degree, have come about their jobs and skills through alternative paths.

Audrey Mickahail: That's right. That's right. So we include in that population workers who are a minimum of age 25. They have a high school diploma. They, in many cases, have some college, but they have not completed the bachelor's degree. And so that's a really stunning target for employers, and this is where I spent my career, is advising leaders, advising employers.

And we know that the juice has got to be worth the squeeze for them. So when we say to you that it's 70 million workers, fully half the American workforce, part of what we're trying to argue for when we're talking to employers is this is a target worth paying attention to. It is so vast. STARs are a vast, diverse, overlooked, but yes, skilled part of the workforce. And that's, I think, the key message for us.

Jill Finlayson: How did this requirement come to be? What is the origin of having the degree requirement? Are we seeing it increase in the job listings, or are people starting to think about alternative ways of demonstrating skills?

Audrey Mickahail: Well, one of the things that we studied is what happened in the past 20 years with respect to bachelor's degree requirements. I'm certainly old enough and have been in the workforce long enough to have worked through many ups and downs in the labor market. I was in the workforce when dot come bubble burst and all of the aftermath of that, and certainly in the workforce in 2008, the Great Recession.

And one of the things that was actually talked about quite a bit in the news at the time was the fact that talent acquisition professionals were being inundated with applications, because there were so many people out of work. Almost out of desperation, there was a need to filter applicants.

And so one of the things that we observed in the data is at that time, we actually backslid, in a sense. And what I mean by that is we started to see degree requirements being applied in jobs that previously did not require them.

One has tremendous empathy for why that happened at that time, but to your point in the intro, one of the things that is really ripe for re-examination is is that still necessary? Are those screening-out mechanisms the right way to go about talent acquisition? We would argue that screening folks in and looking at the skills they do have, rather than the credential they don't have, is a far more effective way to go about a skills-based talent acquisition hiring process. And part of the rationale here is if we can align on skills, as the lingua Franca, as the common denominator of what first makes individuals effective in their jobs, and secondly, how to more productively and reliably filter candidates, that creates a more efficient labor market for all workers.

Jill Finlayson: Let's talk about where we're coming from and where you see we should be going based on this. So when we look at college education-- so, first of all, we're seeing rising levels of income inequality. Economic upward mobility has declined since the 1940s and is not getting better.

And then we also see that compounded with college debt. The average cost of going to a four-year institution in state would be, like, $27,000. Out of State, you're talking $46,000, and that's per year. So we're talking about a couple hundred thousand dollars over four years. The average student loan debt is $29,000. So there's all of these factors that say college education is expensive.

It does teach you how to learn, and in some majors, teaches you very technical foundational skills. But does it teach work skills is another question. So I'd love for your insights on how does the college degree play into some of these larger societal dynamics, and where do we see opportunities to change that dialogue?

Audrey Mickahail: It's really critical for the conversation to evolve away from college-or. It's college-and. If you want to go to college, if that's the right choice for you, if you can afford it, for a whole bunch of reasons, we are very big believers in college. And it is still a very reliable path to the middle class.

The thing that we would object to, and the thought I would leave folks with is it's a great bridge to opportunity. The problem is when that becomes a drawbridge that prevents others from being able to experience some of those same opportunities.

So it's really about opening the aperture and expanding the notion of who is skilled and who is qualified. If college is your path, that's fantastic, and we would never try and dissuade anyone from pursuing a bachelor's degree. But that is not everyone's preferred pathway.

The challenge has been that there's kind of a zero-sum game conversation that I think is unhelpful. And even if we were able to provide everyone who wants a college education with one, we would still be ignoring 70 million STARs in the labor market today for whom college is either not preferable, or maybe not attainable. And so I think there's plenty of reasons to go to college, again, if that's what you want to do.

But we should not anchor the message for young people today. And I'm a mother myself. And you either go to college, or you're somehow less than. That's a tragic message, and I do think there's so many opportunities, whether it's apprenticeship, or whether it's trades in some way.

We're seeing a proliferation of opportunity for folks who don't choose to go for a bachelor's degree. That's the exciting moment that we're in right now. I do see a slight shift in momentum. I think we've got a long way to go. But I think the conversation is just starting to shift in very positive ways, where folks are starting to recognize that, for a variety of reasons again, whether it's based on interest, or affordability, or other requirements that individuals have to live their lives-- whether it's family responsibilities or interest-- there's a real opportunity for us to think more expansively and in a more nuanced way about what it looks like to have family sustaining wages in this country and what you need as a prerequisite to get there.

Jill Finlayson: Let's talk about the prerequisites. So once you have a job, and many of us got our first job in high school or in college, what types of skills are you learning on the job? And how are those skills leading to a career path or transferable skills?

Audrey Mickahail: We've studied 130 million transitions in the labor market-- for a long time, have had this notion of skills adjacencies and transferable skills. And that's a really important concept as well for particularly employers to understand about how they recruit workers. And it's important for workers to understand about themselves.

So let's take, for example, the idea of a first job that one might have. Like, my first job was working in a fast food restaurant. I was 14 years old, and I learned customer service skills. I learned to communicate efficiently. I had to learn to multitask, time management. In some cases, I had to deal with things like conflict and how to resolve conflict.

I think we have not done as much as we might to help folks understand and enumerate the skills that they're gaining in their experiences and how to surface those skills for employers in their next job, how to talk about the very real and active skills that they develop.

Just about every job in this labor market requires communication skills, but do we know how to communicate about that? That's, I think, a really critical part of the evolution that we're starting to see happen. But I think, again, long way to go here. We're in the very early days. That's one side of it. That's the employee, the worker side of it.

Now, let's look at the employer side of the equation. When we're talking to employers, one of the things they often tell us is that they have a certain set of really hard-to-fill roles. And they employ tactics that they've learned over time, and they're very reasonable tactics. There are things, like we have campus recruiting initiatives, or we know this company that is down the road from us has great training for salespeople, so we try to poach their salespeople. There are all kinds of hacks that employers have developed, a sort of institutional knowledge about what makes individuals effective and what makes them potentially strong contributors to their organizations.

One of the things that we've done in our research is actually examine the movement that workers have made from one job to the other. We see that everyone active in the labor market makes transitions based on their skills. The difference between STARs and bachelor's degree holders is that when we look at this calculation that we call skills distance, between the job they're in and the job they move to, that skills distance is much shorter for STARs. And what that means is, frankly, employers take bets on a worker with a bachelor's degree than they are on a worker within a STAR.

So we have developed a tool, and it's free to use. It's called Stellar Sight and can be reached at stellarsight.org. And one of the things that this tool enables employers to do is to search for the job that they're looking for-- let's say it's software engineer-- and look at the jobs that people have transitioned out of into that target job. So let me explain what I mean.

So if I'm looking for a software engineer, and it's a pretty hard-to-fill role-- there are more openings for software engineers than we have workers. Now, I can try and compete and poach from other employers existing software engineers, and we see employers certainly doing that quite a bit, same as it ever was.

But what might it look like if we were to take a look at the labor market data that's available to us and identify the source job? What's the job that the software engineer had before they became a software engineer? Maybe they were a web developer. Maybe they were a database administrator. And by looking at those existing-- like these are real transitions that real workers have made in the American labor market-- might we think more expansively about what qualification means?

And maybe we could recruit someone who is in that source job, and perhaps that gets us quite a bit of the way there. Maybe getting them the rest of the way there is really about strong onboarding, coaching, and mentoring. Maybe there's some amount of upskilling that might be needed.

But there are creative ways that are, in fact, data informed that employers can take today to think a bit more creatively about the roles that they have open and how to fill them, particularly when those roles are harder to fill, when there's a higher volume role. Getting employers to think in their own non-traditional ways and open up the aperture of how they think about sourcing and talent acquisition, including what transitions we have seen in the past, is all about addressing what I think is a core concern for many employers, which is hiring is risky.

Yes, hiring is risky, but that's not unique to STARs. All hiring is risky. And so when we use data, part of it is in service of helping employers understand where they might be able to de-risk all of their hiring, and not just limit that perception to STARs in the workforce.

Jill Finlayson: So helping these employers look at expanding their outreach where they're targeting, changing the proxies to look for more things that are skills adjacent, and being able to provide the supports that employees would need to transition from one role up the ladder to the next role.

Audrey Mickahail: That's exactly right. And I would add to that that the cost of doing nothing, for many employers, is higher than the cost of, perhaps, upskilling that individual or providing coaching and mentoring.

And I want to be clear here. I don't want to conflate the idea of upskilling someone and looking at source jobs as a notion that only benefits STARs-- just to be clear about that. But the idea is addressing the very real and meaningful concerns that employers have as they're just trying to find qualified workers to join their organizations.

Part of the argument that we have is that the solutions that, by the way, create opportunity and access for STARs, are actually the right mechanisms for all workers. And getting over that hump a little bit is where we often have the conversations with employers, often starting with very senior individuals who want to see their workforces transformed.

And we can get there. We can convince a CEO or a CHRO that expanding the aperture, that removing degree requirements where they're used indiscriminately makes great sense. Often, what happens next is when we start to talk about or with the HR professionals, the hiring managers, they're just responsible for getting their day jobs done.

And particularly-- and here's another moment of empathy for the hiring manager. Often these are individuals who are maybe hiring a couple of times a year. They may not be hiring extensively. So part of the challenge here is bringing that conversation and getting folks to think creatively when, by the way, they're trying to backfill for someone, or they just had a new position open. And what they're struggling with is making sure that they can deliver on their objectives, their metrics. And so asking someone to change their mindsets and their processes in a world where this is actually not even their full-time job, that's a real challenge, and it's one that we have a lot of empathy for. So we do our best to cast the opportunity in terms of what an old client of mine used to call WIIFM-- what's in it for me.

There's a cost of doing nothing here. There's a cost of not changing. And that is why, coming back to where we started, being clear about the fact that when you put a degree requirement on a job that may not need it, particularly if it's a generic bachelor's degree requirement, you are not only eliminating from consideration off the top, you are disqualifying half the workforce.

But you're also disqualifying-- and it must be said-- the majority of Black workers, of Hispanic workers, of veterans, of rural workers. And so this is not a political issue. This is not specific to one group or population. This is a universal issue of making our labor market more effective for all workers.

Jill Finlayson: What do you think is the primary thing holding back STARs, and how do we address some of those barriers you just mentioned?

Audrey Mickahail: Well, I think the lowest hanging fruit is that misperception that that's all wrapped up in the college experience and the bachelor's degree. I've heard folks say things like individuals who have attained a bachelor's degree have shown that they have grit. I guess I would say to that, is that the only way an individual can demonstrate grit? I would argue it's not.

But again, expanding college access is and has been very important in this country, and our post-secondary institutions are huge differentiators for our economy. They're a huge source of value. I don't want to undermine or suggest anything different.

What I would say, though, is understanding that calculus looks different for different individuals. There's an article in The Wall Street Journal this week about the ROI of a bachelor's degree. That was fascinating, and I think it's a question worth asking.

The simplest thing that we can do, and why I'm so excited to be here with you today, Jill, is to simply confront the perceptions and, arguably, misperceptions that folks have around what it means to go to college, the importance of college as the primary mechanism or pathway into the workforce, and what it means for individuals who don't have that, what it says about them. I think we make certain assumptions about folks who have not attained a college degree that are inaccurate.

Jill Finlayson: My father himself came from Britain and went to Police Academy, and so never did get his bachelor's moved to the United States, and always had that in the back of his mind that he didn't have this credential, even though he advanced to being a senior VP at a large company. So what do people internalize with this dialogue that you're describing around the bachelor's?

Jill Finlayson: I've heard stories from STARs that they have been in jobs, they have excelled in jobs. They've been then put up for promotion in for work that they have essentially already been doing, and they've been told, sorry, you are not eligible for promotion, because that next job requires a bachelor's degree. And we're talking about individuals who, in many cases, have already demonstrated the skill.

We wrote a case study with the State of Maryland under then Governor Hogan, who had a program called No Degree, No Problem. And Maryland is meaningful in the state of the movement towards STARs hiring and tearing the paper ceiling, in that Maryland was the first state to stand up and say, we're going to tear the paper ceiling. We're going to hire STARs.

There was an urgency, because the state was seeing longer times to hire at that point, which was about two years ago. So there was a WIIFM. There was a need to address. There was a motivated governor who saw this as a legacy issue for his administration. But there were also very human stories that were emerging that brought poignancy to the opportunity for the State of Maryland.

So, for example, one of the leaders we interviewed for the case study had said, I joined the State of Maryland with an MBA, and I was given opportunities by virtue of having my degrees that my colleagues around me did not have because they lacked the degree. Now, arguably, they had longer tenure. They knew the work better. The difference was I got an opportunity to get promoted, to experience mobility in ways that my colleagues didn't based on that one difference. And that just seemed patently unfair.

On the positive side, at the time, the chief information security officer of the state was himself a STAR and was respected and beloved. And folks saw him as an example of what we would call a shining STAR, someone who is already in a high wage role, someone who is a proof point for what STARs can do.

And they got it. They got it. There was what they called an inescapable logic to removing degree requirements where they weren't needed.

Jill Finlayson: I've even experienced this firsthand. I was at an edtech company, and I was doing a sort of entry-level marketing role. And they said I would not be advanced to a full marketing manager because I didn't have a master's degree.

So this manifests itself in a number of ways, and now we're seeing it even manifesting in the artificial intelligence that's used to screen these applications. So what are you seeing in terms of AI and now automatically eliminating people who don't have a bachelor's degree?

Audrey Mickahail: It's such an important issue. We hear manifestations of this from many of the employer organizations we work with. One of my colleagues told me a story about a talent acquisition leader in an organization who actually didn't even realize that the default for their applicant tracking system was to require a degree. So much of what we are trying to do in these early stages, we're seeing need that is driving ingenuity and change.

But too often, what we're battling are, frankly, fairly simple things. And so if I would advise if there are employers listening, don't take for granted. Don't go to the defaults. And I mean defaults, both from the perspective of perception, from the way we've always done things, and certainly also from a systems perspective.

So we're really excited about the possibility of what generative AI can do. At the same time, we definitely, as an organization, are very concerned about recreating the world as it was rather than building the world as it should be. And that's the risk that we run if we're learning from historical data and, frankly, a highly unequal set of systems. That's certainly the risk.

I do think there is an incredible opportunity for talent acquisition leaders, for employer organizations to start to ask questions about how AI is being used and to ensure that those approaches, those default settings, match their intentions. And my hope certainly, and the hope of Opportunity at Work more broadly, is that we hire and vet talent based on skill and have that intention reflected in our systems and our processes and in our approaches.

Jill Finlayson: This is more than a hiring problem, though. This is also a retention problem and an upskilling problem. What does it look like to reinvest in STARs and, as you said, workers on the whole?

Audrey Mickahail: I love that question so much, because we actually are hearing from employers that where their areas of interest-- and this is true everywhere, but in particular in the private sector. One of the areas that employers have raised as an area of concern is how do we think about internal mobility?

And if I broaden that out a little bit, I would say, how do we think about the full talent management life cycle, so not just sourcing and recruiting? And I alluded to this a little bit earlier, but how do we onboard effectively so that we don't lose them in six months because we didn't give them a clear view of what it looks like to be successful in the context of that employer organization?

What does it look like to develop talent over time, to give them opportunities, to provide the feedback, and coaching, and training needed, not only in the current role, but for the next role? And that's where we start to think about what are the mobility opportunities?

Again, I have to come back to the understanding of skills. And that's a lot of work, and a piece of work that not all organizations have fully taken on. To be clear, that's work that is, again, needed, I think, for the effective functioning of any talent management approach.

But, of course, based on the historical inequities and opportunities we've seen as obstacles for STARs, STARs have an opportunity to benefit, perhaps disproportionately, in a organization that has a skills taxonomy, and a backbone, and way of working that is anchored in skill. The thing I would highlight as a potential example is some of that work is already happening-- maybe not in every part of every organization, but savvy leaders have already observed things like skill adjacencies or opportunities.

I'll give you a quick anecdote of a CIO I interviewed in a bank, who observed that the individuals who were in the operations functions of this financial services company made excellent programmers. And the reason for that is if you think about what fundamentally programming is, it's about creating automation for process. The individuals coming out of their operations team had a deep understanding of and orientation around process.

And this is a non-obvious, in some ways, notion or application of the skills adjacency concept. But this was a progressive and thoughtful leader with a real need and made an observation that she was actually able to transform into an agreement to create a career pathway for folks from operations into IT in that case, again, based on the fact that now we're just trying to do the right thing, but actually there's a real business need and a real skill that folks from the operations background were able to infuse into the IT department.

Jill Finlayson: I'm glad to hear you return to the STARs, the employee themselves. We've talked a lot about the employer goals and needs and opportunities. But for the person who doesn't have a traditional bachelor's degree, what are some of the gateway jobs, and how can that help unlock new pathways for them?

Audrey Mickahail: Gateway jobs are those jobs that are accessible from lower-wage roles. And, based on the observations we've made, the transition work I talked about before, they tend to open up multiple higher-wage pathways. So they're really like springboards or skeleton keys that unlock multiple pathways for workers.

And as such, they're really critical jobs. They are things like customer service rep, or computer support specialist. There's a whole list of them. And again, this is research that we've done and is freely available. Those are just a couple of examples of jobs that, again, accessible from lower wage positions, and also are wonderful skill-building opportunities that then open up additional pathways into higher-wage work.

So that's the research behind it and a couple of examples. I guess if I were advising both employers and STARs, I would encourage folks to think about, for the employer perspective, what are the gateway jobs in your organization? We can certainly point to what we've seen in the labor market writ large, but savvy employers have understood that they probably have a job that looks like that, that is a way for them to bring workers into their organizations, give them a set of concrete work skills, get them acclimated to their organization and what success looks like in their context, and then provide those opportunities to their workers to then start to think about other pathways.

I'd love to give a couple of examples. And in so doing, my hope is that workers will see in their own experiences and the jobs that they've sought out what opportunities get opened up to them from those particular examples or those steps in their career paths.

We wrote a case study with Microsoft. There was a tremendous leader. His name is Todd Miner. He ran what were called, at one point, the Academies within Microsoft. The use case or the opportunity that had arisen at Microsoft is at the beginning of the pandemic, all of the retail locations that Microsoft operated were shutting down because of the pandemic. And that created an opportunity, actually, for the company to think differently about workers who were in those retail positions.

And part of that-- and again, I want to come back to this theme of creative leaders making observations about and taking care of their workers. In this case, what had been observed was that in the Microsoft retail environments, the retail sales people were doing very high volumes of B2B sales, business to business sales. So not just consumers coming in and buying the device, but there were actually pretty large dollar amounts. It was a significant amount of business happening in the retail environment that we're actually B2B.

What that told Todd was these are individuals who are skilled. They're closing pretty large deals, larger than we might have expected. And that a-ha for him was that individuals in the retail environment could, with their skills, transition into what Microsoft called digital sales.

Digital sales happens to be one of those roles for Microsoft. It is a gateway job. It's a role that people come in, take on, they do for 18 months, and often find pathways into other parts of the organization-- a tremendous skill building opportunity, accessible from a lower-wage role, which the retail sales role was, and a place where you can kind of learn the ropes, develop skill, figure out what might be an exciting next step in the career pathway.

That program was successful enough that they ended up expanding it globally and expanding it to other roles. There's a lot more to say about that, but the principle here that I think is so illuminating and exciting for someone like me who wants to see STARs achieve mobility is this was based on an observation that Todd made. We actually also have reams of labor market data to say that yeah, retail sales to sales rep is one of the most, if not the most common transition that happens in the labor market.

And so this is a well understood pathway. How might we expand it for even more STARs who are interested in careers in sales?

Jill Finlayson: For people in these roles, I think that's a great example. How can you as a person advocate for yourself? And if you are a community college student, or a veteran, or somebody who's working in retail, or somebody who's working in custodial and building maintenance, how do you articulate your skills better? Or where can you go to learn how to articulate those transferable skills?

Audrey Mickahail: I think one of the things that is helpful is plenty of tools out there, and there's actually really exciting opportunities. There's the US Chamber Foundation, IBM. There are a few different organizations that are thinking really hard about this opportunity of helping workers and learners take their experiences and translate them into a skills-based CV or resume in order to support folks in developing that language. And I think it is a really big opportunity.

So the good news is there are lots of examples of organizations that are working on this opportunity for workers to help them articulate their skills. So there's technology, there are tools coming in the absence of that.

One of the things that we do, just as a part of our practice as an organization, is really sit, and think, and observe workers, and think about the skills that they're deploying. When we try to understand what is this job in a standardized way, what is it comprised of from a skill perspective, there are tools to help you do that.

However, I think there's also just the simple reflection exercise of what are the things I now know how to do as a worker that I didn't know how to do previously? What did I do today that was in the realm of problem solving? Or how did I spend my time? I think there's a lot we can do as individuals to articulate, to surface, to recognize the skills that we deploy day to day, that we simply haven't developed the muscle to do.

So yes, go look for the tools. The tools are out there. But also, you as an individual in the workforce showing up every day, have the best insight into the skills that you are deploying. And when I think for myself, or I talk to my own children who have summer jobs and things like that, I do encourage them to get really clear about the skills that they're learning, the skills that they're bringing, and to list those as they think about updating their resumes or the applications that they might put in for jobs, to denominate their value as a worker in terms of those skills that they have built and the ones that they are seeking to build.

I don't know if that's a super helpful answer, but we can get pretty far down the road just in your own reflection of what you're doing day to day, how that shifts over time, the problems you're able to solve.

Jill Finlayson: That's a great jumping off point for the employee. We've talked a lot about things that the employer should do, everything from how do you define a better proxy for the bachelor's to how do you really make a skills-based job description and setting some standards. But if you were to give two actionable first steps, what would be your advice for the employer?

Audrey Mickahail: The first thing I would say is go to where your need is. Every organization is, to some extent, in a constant reshaping of their workforces over time. And doing that big old strategic workforce planning exercise may be overwhelming. But you can start with one job family.

You might think about the roles that are hardest to fill in your organization. You might also think about new-to-world roles in your organization, because the reality is there are all of these new jobs that are emerging.

And that's a great place to question. Do we really need a bachelor's degree for this particular job when, frankly, there are no degrees out there in that discipline or there are few of them, and it's a new enough discipline that, frankly, the post-secondary system may not have yet caught up? So what would be the purpose in requiring a generic bachelor's degree in something that no one has actually studied or very few people have actually studied?

So it's really starting from a place of where does need meet opportunity? How do we start in a way that is practical and achievable? How do we come up with a plan of assembling what our friends and colleagues at the State of Maryland called a coalition of the willing? Those two things-- start with your business need and start with receptive business partners-- are probably the places I would encourage employers to just get started.

Jill Finlayson: Is there anything we haven't touched upon regarding the tearing of the paper ceiling and the future of work? Any final words to share.

Audrey Mickahail: The thought I'd love to leave folks with is we see exemplary employers and incredible workers coming together under this banner of tearing the paper ceiling. It's early days. We feel like we're just getting started. But the momentum, the energy, the inescapable logic of doing this work together is very clear.

The next steps are the ones that we are going to-- I think we need to come together on and help problem solve together, because we're in this emerging space where no one organization has figured it all out. So tearing the paper ceiling for us is not just about creating opportunity for STARs. It is also about employer communities.

How do we come together and share what's working, what's hard? How do we anticipate the obstacles and problem solve them together, given the fact that no one organization, no one leader has it all figured out? So how do we come together and figure it out together? And how do we sustain energy and momentum, even when, inevitably, there are setbacks and challenges, and things don't go perhaps according to the timeline that we expected?

So I think we're in an incredible moment for the STARs movement, for the skills first movement. We are bringing data to light across the field. This is not just an opportunity at work thing, but so many partners are banding together to understand how we make an American labor market that is effective and powerful. And it's working, not just for STARs, but it's working for everyone. It's working for employers as well.

Jill Finlayson: I think that is exactly the point, that this is an incredible moment, not only to meet the needs of equity and improve upward mobility and access to fulfilling jobs and growth, but it's also an opportunity to fulfill the employer need for skilled employees and retaining top talent. And so it's really exciting to see you dive into the research here. Thank you so much for joining us.

Audrey Mickahail: Thank you, Jill. Appreciate the time.

Jill Finlayson: And with that, I hope you've enjoyed this latest in a long series of podcasts that we'll be sending your way every month. Please share with friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this Future of Work journey with us. And make sure to check out extension.berkeley.edu to find a variety of courses and certificates to help you thrive in this new working landscape.

And to see what's coming up at EDGE in Tech, go ahead and visit edge.Berkeley.edu. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll be back next month with another look at the future of work. The Future of Work podcast is hosted by Jill Finlayson, produced by Sarah Benzuly, and edited by Matt Dipietro and Natalie Newman.

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