Skills and Jobs 2022: Workforce Development
Leading Practices and Digital Innovation to Improve the Canadian and US Workforce Development Systems
My thinking, and that of many of the organizations with which I work - LinkedIn, Microsoft; US and Canadian federal, state, and local governments; think tanks; investment firms; and many post-secondary institutions - has progressed from a focus on degrees and credentials to skills and jobs. The policies and practices that support skills as currency for better jobs present a particular opportunity for the workforce development industry.
While the below recommendations span time-tested leading practices and nascent innovations, most are based on long-standing principles that haven’t been applied in US workforce development for one reason or another (plus ça change). This 2019 three volume set from the Federal Reserve System, the Heldrich Center, the Ray Marshall Center, and the Upjohn Institute (four of the top “think tanks” in the space, rounded out by Jobs for the Future and Brookings) answers the question: “How can well-structured and effective workforce programs and policies result in better economic outcomes for individuals, businesses, and communities?” It was my introduction to fixing the US workforce system and I can’t recommend it enough.
The LinkedIn and Microsoft initiatives referenced throughout this document are intended only as examples of leading practices in the use of technology in workforce development. I’m struggling the most with how to scale such innovations and particularly the change management, digital literacy and capacity building necessary for successful large scale technology deployments.
I’m most excited about the marrying of private sector technology with public sector scale and impact in a relationship that Marriana Mazzucato would describe as symbiotic and mission driven. My workforce development work has progressed from bilateral public private partnerships to multilateral ecosystems with associations, labor, economic and workforce development organizations. Exemplary outcomes of these PPPs include university systems better able to deliver online learning and governments more capable of leveraging data and tech to fill jobs.
Employer Engagement, Frontline LMI and Recruiting as a model for Workforce
Labour market information (LMI) is the foundation of the demand-driven workforce system. To ensure education and training systems deliver on social and economic outcomes governments need to start with robust labour market information. Providing granular, customizable and accessible LMI to both system administrators and local frontline workers also lays the foundation for state and national systems of lifelong learning.
Equip career counsellors, developers and navigators with the skills to use these LMI resources. They require digital and statistical fluency to navigate LMI and online career software, and ongoing learning in relevant fields such as behavioural economics and pedagogy.
Before, during and after participation, LMI must also be used to ensure education and training pathways deliver on their ROI. This analysis should be particular focused on those coming from the most underprivileged zip codes. Early in the pandemic, I pulled together these examples of LMI dashboards and have been excited by using LinkedIn Talent Insights for macroeconomic analysis at the state level and career development at the frontline.
Across the US workforce system, State and local agencies are recognizing that recruiting is essential to the education to employment pipeline. Borrowing the best from staffing companies' approaches to recruitment and placement is also a new leading practice for workforce development. LinkedIn’s work in Oregon exemplifies this trend which is being scaled via our partnership with the National Association of Workforce Agencies explained below.
As André Côté, Gladys Okine-Ahovi and I put forward in our Public Policy Forum paper on How to Mobilize Higher Education and Workforce Development for the Rapid Re-Employment of Canadians after the pandemic:
The COVID-19 crisis has derailed the careers of millions of Canadians. To support them, workforce leaders, and policy and decision makers need to mobilize education and training systems in some key ways – starting with robust labour market information and laying the foundation for a national system of lifelong learning.
More Support for Workforce Development Practitioners
A related and common recommendation for workforce development and higher education system reform is to fund career development. Further career development could begin in K12 and run through community colleges and universities through employers and the workforce development system. Career developers (also called Career Advisors, Coaches, Consultants, Counsellors, Practitioners) need to be paid more, be better trained and have more digital capacity including access to the latest labour market information and infrastructure to deliver their services either online or in a digitally enhanced hybrid manner.
These essential actors at the core of the service-delivery model are not just under-paid but also under-supported. Prioritize resources for career development practitioners. Expand the scope of their roles and offering training and capacity building around career pathways design and navigation, and so they can offer further coaching and transitional supports to the most vulnerable clients. The wraparound social supports needed by career developers parallel those of their clients. They can could include elements of personal professional development (coaching sessions), self-care (extended healthcare benefits, counselling/therapy), and shoring up of external supports (childcare, transportation, food security).
This suggestion parallels Gladys, André and my Public Policy Forum recommendation that Canada:
increase support for employment and career development services geared to workers experiencing pre-existing and pandemic-related barriers.
Further Blurring Higher Ed and Workforce Development
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a cataclysm in the labour market, but also opens a policy and funding window to bring the higher education and workforce-development systems closer together and closer to employers to make them more effective.
My favourite jobtech (check out his market map) venture capitalist cited a recent article that summarized this well:
“We need bridges between employers and higher education institutions… The bridges need to be supported by five elements:
(1) Programs should be designed backwards by identifying what relatively small minimum viable skill(s) job candidates must have in order to become 100% employable for that first job;
(2) Human skills and technical skills are required for that first job, so train to both…
(3) The educational pathway to an entry-level job… should be shorter and less expensive than a college degree…
(4) It must increase certainty that it will work – that it will lead to a job or a promotion… and decrease any failure risk for both the job candidate and the hiring employer.
(5) The program must be held accountable. Any program that does not fulfill #4 should be discontinued.”
Simple ideas are relatively easy to scale such as:
a) expanding the placement of workforce development career developers in schools of all levels and
b) community colleges unbundling and increasingly focusing on assessment of prior learning and skills from:
work experience,
3rd party content like LinkedIn Learning,
c) use of innovative technology to bridge the gaps between these systems:
via Career Explorer, LinkedIn’s data uncovers career paths by matching your skills to thousands of job titles.
Microsoft Career Coach uses AI and LinkedIn’s Economic Graph data to inform students’ career exploration with local and global job market trends.
Verticalizing Training, Recruitment and Assessment or Labor, Govt and Employers together
Running up against:
· despair at lifeboat jobs,
· an increasing recognition that degrees are a poor investment, and
· online education and job matching,
community college and workforce development systems will increasingly need to actively collaborate and recruit candidates online. They also need to work more closely with employers making work integrated learning in all its forms (apprenticeship, internship, etc.) as important as its national emphasis would suggest.
Perhaps the best model in America is Futuro Health: an employer (Kaiser Permanente) partnered with a union (SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West) "to grow the largest network of credentialed allied healthcare workers." By recruiting students into a pathway to employment, an employer was able to access a larger pool of candidates while training them more specifically for the skills necessary for its jobs. This project also replaced the zero-sum and competitive model often associated with the relationship between labor and the government and the private sector in the US, with the balancing of mutual benefit that some European systems have exemplified. In other words, this was an example of unions, government and employers collaborating on pathways, recognition and equity.
Another example of a symbiotic public private partnership to close skills gaps more efficiently is LinkedIn Talent Solutions recent expansion of its partnership with the US National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA). This compliments LinkedIn's long standing nation-wide and similarly symbiotic partnership with NASWA on the National Labor Exchange.
I’m excited to have recently joined the board of Ontario Tech TALENT which brings together many of the above recommendations in one organization from skills-based-hiring to recruiting as a model for workforce development and from greater use of LMI to ensure career outcomes to blurring higher ed and workforce development.
Online + Brick and Mortar Education
Invest in human skills, assessment, and interactions like networking, coaching and mentorship.
Many foundational, human or soft skills can only be learned through human interaction and these are the most universally in-demand and timeless or durable skills. Somewhat surprisingly, the result of increased online learning could be that less privileged populations have increasing access to technical skills but less access to skills like communication, collaboration and critical thinking. Instead, we need to highlight, teach, learn to communicate and value, human skills and human interaction more generally. Assessment, particularly of human skills, is usually the weakest component of workforce and training programs. The social determinants of employment and educational success also continue to be neglected.
Key take-aways include that we are all on a spectrum between learning best in person vs. online and between so many other “kinds” of learning from solitary to group work that the opportunity of online needs to be calibrated based on the kind of learning and world we want to create. Think of it as tuning edtech and jobtech or even our educational and workforce development systems to the needs of humanity instead of for the benefit of the VCs and politicians behind these technologies. Thinking again of Mazzucato’s mission-oriented policy making.
Skills-Based Hiring and Learning and Good Jobs
Expand and incentivize tactical initiatives like skills-based hiring and blind interviews into systemwide initiatives in order to decrease bias such as towards credentials.
Social and soft skills are often how we distinguish ourselves. This could be based on the more formal class-structures that continue to pervade India and the UK or the more informal structures that have developed around education in the US and Canada. The combination of elites having greater access to in person education and this education having a greater impact on their human skills could result in greater inequality despite online education democratizing access to technical skills.
Removing bias through the removal of names, pictures, better interviewing tech and techniques, such as structured and blind interviewing, could help. Skills mapping and automated job matching could also be used to actively combat such bias by focusing on skills not associated with class or privilege and rather on other transferable skills.
LinkedIn's Chief Economist Karin Kimbrough echoed these statements.
In this sense, skills are the new currency of the labor market. Recent LinkedIn data shows the skill sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double.
[…]
Companies are realizing that skills-based hiring works: hirers leveraging skills data to find the right match are 60% more likely to find a successful hire than those not relying on skills.
And by removing unnecessary credentials, more workers can transition into better paying jobs via the relevant skills they bring to the role. Research from Opportunity@Work shows that people Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs) have demonstrated skills for roles with salaries at least 50% higher than their current job. Black, Hispanic, and Veteran workers in particular are overrepresented as STARs in the U.S., and make up the majority of firstline workers. These groups stand to benefit most from a transition towards a skills-based talent ecosystem.”
New distributed identity and verified credential technologies are enabling learning and skills data to be intelligently mapped to jobs. Focusing on verifiable credentials like open badges, micro-credentials and portfolios that demonstrate skills could could result in greater labour market efficiency and economic productivity as well as inclusivity and equity.
Good jobs are increasingly being defined in many different ways that go beyond living-wage salaries to include measurement of their purposefulness, career development, etc. Good jobs and skills-based-hiring lie at the heart of a growing ecosystem focused on skills including the good jobs impact investing private equity firm Two Sigma Impact at and interview-tech company Hireguide. Their work aligns with statements from the Biden Administration:
"Employers need to adopt skills-based hiring, US officials say…Secretary Gina Raimondo, the U.S. Department of Commerce secretary, is urging HR managers to adopt skills-based training and reduce their reliance on college degrees…Filling open jobs and improving equity in the workforce will take job training and skills-based hiring by employers, said The White House officials at a conference this week.
All of these approaches require further piloting and evaluation as they could also have unintended DEI consequences.
Learning and Employment Records, Skills Wallets, Badges and Microcreds Deep-dive
There is growing interest and excitement around portable Learning and Employment Records (LERs). Key organizations working on skills wallets and LERs include the Open Skills Network, Western Governors University, the Walmart Foundation, IBM, MIT Media Lab, and Credential engine. Jobs for the Future has produced amongst the best market landscape of wallets, and the Indiana Achievement Wallet is among the best know state-wide initiatives
The very recent consolidation of the major badging platforms, with Pearson buying Credly and Instructure (Canvas) buying Concentric Sky (Badgr), suggests the largest education companies are paying attention to verifiable credentials just as they have become one of the few viable short term widespread use cases for blockchain in skills and employment.
Statements about credentials on a blockchain as alternatives AND additions to degrees are commonplace. However, there is much less certainty about how an LER based system can be actualized across the education to employer to training cycle to actually reduce current labor market inefficiencies. Most importantly, I have yet to see a path to employer buy-in: how do we get employers, particularly SMBs excited about skills based hiring and specifically LERs or skills wallets? This is the challenge being addressed by amazing folks like Sharon Leu at JFF and Sean Murphy at Walmart.
Micro-credentialing efforts continue grow alongside if not with any more direction that the LER and skills wallet movements, as described in this recent summary.
Rapid response programs for re-employment
With large scale changes to the labour market ongoing, this excerpt from our PPF paper summarized some of the many short term training programs that have been responding successfully with Lighthouse Labs and NPower being amongst the most impactful organizations I’ve worked with in this space.
Triggered following a major business closure at a sectoral or regional scale, these programs create response teams to support large numbers of displaced workers. Delivered and funded provincially, the teams communicate with workers, employers and the community, and develop action plans that apply local LMI and engage local workforce agencies, and education and training providers. Examples include Ontario’s Dedicated Training and Employment Services Action Centre, which the province set up in response to the GM plant closure in Oshawa, and the Canada-Saskatchewan Rapid Response Teams. Australia rolled out a suite of heavily discounted, six-month online courses geared to workforce areas of “national priority” such as nursing, teaching, counselling and IT.
These programs should be collaboratively developed education-industry partnerships that identify and communicate employer-relevant skills and competencies, including online and work-integrated learning, and that offer career clarity and employer networks. Many programs of this type have emerged already. George Brown College in Toronto has launched an online micro-credential program in service robotics, co-developed with robotics solutions provider Global DWS. Software development bootcamps are another example of this immersive style of short training programs. Yet, while industry has long lamented the time it takes to develop new curriculum and training to meet emerging needs, this type of industry-partnered, rapidly incubated skills development remains rare outside continuing education schools.
With provincial funding, eCampus Ontario has incubated education-industry partnerships to create micro-certification programs for skills in high demand. With a national mandate, the Future Skills Centre recently announced $37 million of investments in 30 community-based pilot programs to support people moving to new jobs or industries.
Odds and Ends
My recent personal articles :
(2021) Skills and Jobs 2021: Lessons from ASU-GSV for the Future of Education and Workforce Development
(2020) mobilizing higher ed and workforce development for the rapid re-employment of Canadians
(2020) what needs to change in Canada's higher education system and what's working
A summary of LinkedIn’s workforce development and higher education system public private partnerships:
Partnership with the US National Association of State Workforce Agencies
How Oregon Used LinkedIn to Market and Strengthen Their Workforce Development Program
Fortune article featuring a success story from our state-wide partnership with Virginia Career Works
Ontario: We partnered with the Government of Ontario to support its unemployed and unemployment services. Press release LinkedIn CEO’s post
The previous province wide LinkedIn Learning deployment to all million members of Ontario’s universities and colleges resulted in 300K+ individuals watching 4.7M+ videos.
It inspired this eCampusOntario Casebook and shows how LinkedIn can work with millions of clients as highlighted in this short video.
Washington State: Workforce SW WA partners with LinkedIn Learning to meet business skills needs and provide 500 job seekers online training options
Charlotte, NC: LinkedIn Learning used by Mayor's Youth Employment program as part of a "virtual summer internship" Case Study 1 Case Study 2 and call out from NC’s Governor
Utah: Our state of Utah pilot resulted a 14% decrease in UI exhaustion and compliments our long standing nation-wide partnership with National Association of State Workforce Agencies on the National Labor Exchange.
Studies of impact of LinkedIn Learning on workforce development:
CivicAction explored the impact of 2000 licenses distributed to 75 employment service providers in Toronto which showed a 42% employment increase.
AlphaPlus studied the benefits for Ontario career developers.
Duke studied the impact of LinkedIn on Job Readiness Training
For additional background:
Our latest career explorer resource and the free content that’s part of our parent company Microsoft’s Global Skills Initiative
More background on our support for colleges and universities and a short video on the same.
Some examples of our work with specific disadvantaged populations include: veterans, the formerly incarcerated and people with disabilities.
Connect!
Finally, the groups I work with include the following - if you want to collaborate please do get in touch!
Ontario Tech TALENT (Director on the Board),
Lighthouse Labs (co-founder),
Hireguide (advisor)
Readocracy (advisor)
Board roles with: Canadian Council for Youth Prosperity, Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canadian Club and the Hot Docs Cinema Advisory