Aspiring to Connect the Navajo Nation with Education and Employment
In this episode of the Future of Education podcast, host Michael Horn interviews John Mott, founder and CEO of Aspirability, and Moroni Binali, Aspirability’s community manager living on the Navajo Nation. The conversation explains Aspirability’s core mission: to close the three‑sided gap between employers, education providers, and job seekers by creating hyper‑localized skill maps that translate the exact knowledge, skills, and abilities required for specific roles at specific companies. After five years of work in higher‑ed and corporate training, Mott pivoted to a community‑focused pilot in the Navajo Nation, a reservation of roughly 175,000 residents that faces chronic unemployment, severe housing shortages, limited broadband, and high rates of domestic violence. Leveraging a $500 million ARPA broadband expansion, Aspirability built the first informal labor‑market data collection mechanism on the reservation—a job board that identified roughly 3,500 vacant positions, half of them in the private sector. The team partnered with tribal colleges, the Navajo Nation President’s office, the Tribal Council, tribal enterprises (e.g., housing authority, gaming and tourism), and high schools to align curricula with these identified jobs, create hybrid/remote work pathways, and provide wrap‑around services such as mental‑health counseling and childcare. By enabling residents to earn income from remote or hybrid roles, the program helps victims of domestic abuse achieve financial independence, reduces economic leakage from the reservation, and supports the broader goal of building 35,000 new homes. The guests reflect on surprising findings: the sheer number of private‑sector vacancies, the lack of existing labor‑market data, and the slow tempo of government decision‑making due to limited capacity and cultural notions of time. They stress that lasting impact requires a multi‑year, bottom‑up approach rather than short‑term, top‑down projects.
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Welcome to the Future of Education.
And now, here's your host, Michael Horne.
Welcome to the Future of Education, the show where we are dedicated to a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through those qualities today and those aspirations. I'm tremendously excited for our two guests, one of whom I've known for several years. He's none other than John Mott. He's currently the founder and CEO of Aspirability. John, good to see you.
Good to see you. Thanks for having us.
Yeah, absolutely. And the other is a new friend, Moroni Binali, and he is a community manager at Aspirability who lives with the Navajo Nation and supports the work of aspirability there. And we will talk more about that shortly. But Moroni, welcome. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you, Michael.
Yeah, you bet. So let's get into it. And John, start with you. Just give us the founding story behind Aspirability and your journey to founding it and what you all do now there.
Yeah. So I've been in higher ed and adult ed and corporate ed for my whole career across working at Brigham Young University, corporations like TD Ameritrade, ed tech companies like Learning Objects. And about five years ago, having gone through all of these different versions of trying to, as you stated in your intro, help people get to better career paths, it just kind of struck me. My training backgrounds is as a political scientist. So I've just been thinking about this as a systemic problem. You've got job seekers, employers, education providers, and they don't connect. And so that was the whole purpose of Aspirability, is to try to get better connections, primarily between employers and education providers, to make sure that, you know, if somebody was providing an educational program, it actually aligned with jobs in the job market. And we, we've been working on that in a variety of different ways over the last five years. And really over the last year and a half, two years, we've been focused on, let's work on that problem in a specific community where, you know, if you try to change all of that for the whole world all at once, right, not going to happen. But if you can work with a community where you can say, okay, and in this case it's with the Navajo Nation, okay, we know who the employers are. We know there are two tribal colleges. We know who the job seekers are. Let's work on getting the jobs more clearly defined so that the schools can provide upskilling paths and then we can message that to job seekers and get, get better alignment between what are often, you know, kind of disconnected points in a three, three sided market.
Yeah, so let's stay with that. John, before we go to the Navajo Nation and before I bring you in, I'm just curious because that approach you just talked about sounds like a very, you know what the sponsor of this series, the Charles Koch foundation, and I know a big sponsor of yours in the Charles Koch foundation, what they would talk about this principle of bottoms up, really solving the problem right in a specific area rather than imagining a top down, you know, one size fits all way about it. So just talk to us about sort of what you've learned and what this work really looks like of engaging these three very different stakeholders in what's really a community talent marketplace.
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I'll say there's been tremendous work done by lots of our colleagues and friends and people we know in this space to create taxonomies of jobs. What are the skills required for job A, job B? And that's really important foundational work in this space. But what we've discovered is, and you know, this isn't a shocker to anyone who knows the space. When you get to a specific job at a specific company, these taxonomies in the sky all of a sudden don't matter. It's like, okay, that's nice to know. That's what a cybersecurity analyst is in general practice. But what about here at my financial services company? And so for us, one of the keys has really been getting to the last mile or the last hundred feet. Like what does it mean to what skills or proficiency level for those skills are required for this job at this company, maybe even on this team within that company. It's that hyper localization of skills mapping that's become really critical. And then on the flip of that is how do you help schools see that yes, there is a core, a foundation of skills for every job or career path. But then you do need to provide some way to at least expose people to, okay, yeah, there's cybersecurity, but here's how it's different in fintech versus healthcare versus education and really helping people make that last mile connection to a job.
Just to stay with you for one more moment on that. It sounds like you probably have to get pretty deep with the companies then because they might not know the answer to that.
I'm assuming 100%. You know, we worked with a very, very large company that everybody would recognize the name. They had five postings for the same job at the same time on the same team that were all different. Because what happens, hiring managers write the job postings, HR puts them up, they get you know, interviewees to come in. But you know, if the company itself can't agree on what the job is, it's pretty hard to tell the school, hey, here's what we need. Right. So we do dig in deep, you know, looking at the documentation for the job, but then talking to stakeholders, talking to incumbents, really helping the employer get aligned around. Yes, we agree this is what the set of knowledge, skills and abilities are required for this job. And here's how we're going to measure those consistently every time.
Oh that. So that's really interesting because the assessment piece of that is tricky. So Moroni, let me bring you in here because I'd love to get deeper on, you know, let's do the case study. Right. What does this work look like in the Navajo Nation and how did the work come about?
Yeah, let's may just give some background on the Navajo Nation. It's about 175,000 members that live on the reservation in Arizona and Mexico, Utah, but there's about 400,000 all across the country. On the reservation there's about 50% unemployment underemployment and we've seen numbers as low as 10 and numbers as high as 78. And so that's the beginning of part of the problems we're encountering is just sort of the lack of data. And so these are our best estimates that have gone around numerous federal constraints over land. So that creates impediments to just any type of development. Access for housing, for private sector, for healthcare, for everything. Just these impediments to land which creates all of these bottlenecks and under development as well. Additionally, every year there's some 3,000 high school graduates out of the reservation and they're going to need jobs at some point and there aren't jobs. There aren't many jobs on the reservation. Not enough to keep keep up to what's, what's needed. In addition, one of the other impediments is the lack of housing. So right now in the Navajo Nation there's probably half of the people across the Navajo Nation do not have a house of their own. And so lots of multi generational housing. And so it's over overcrowded. And in order to bring back a workforce up to at least this point to get everyone housed, the Navajo Nation needs to build about 35,000 houses just to just to meet what is currently the demand in the Navajo Nation as of right now. And so there's a lot of these issues going around. Unemployment. And so. And in addition, there's all these other problems that are associated with those in the lower socioeconomic class. So a lot of. There's substance abuse and mental health problems, and there's also problems with infrastructure, long distances, people don't have access to transportation. It's a lot of things going on. And so at the time how we decided how we ended up in the Navajo Nation, I had actually was a graduate student of John's at BYU a number of years ago. Yeah. And so, like John, I focused on public policy, finishing up my PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle in public policy. And so sort of taking a, you know, this broad public policy view of, like, what's happening in the Navajo Nation. And so at the time, actually, I was working with. As a policy worker for a. A tribal. Tribal coalition around sexual assault, domestic violence. So as working on behalf of tribes with the legislature on. And federal government on policies around that. And one of the. One of the key. One of the issues with. With domestic violence that we had talked about was oftentimes a victim of domestic violence can't leave that situation, in part because they don't have a job, that there are financial constraints, and so they can't find a job. So that's. That's more pronounced in rural areas. And so at that point, John and I had talked about that, and we had approached one of the tribal colleges about using this, about using aspirabilities, Strategy, plan, platform, application to really address that need within that domestic violence community across the naval nation. That was the beginning.
I'll just add, Verona. This was at the height of COVID where a lot of people who are. Were victims of domestic violence were now at home all day with their abuser.
So they can't escape because of the lack of a job and because we're in lockdown.
Right, right. So that. That's really where I reached out to Marona and said, man, you know, because we've stayed in touch over the years, and we've been thinking of ways that we could collaborate. Like, wow, there is a crisis right now. Can we. Is there something we can do here?
Right, right. And. And so. So. So John and I talked a bit. I moved off to Seattle to do some work, and I came home. I think it was, I don't know, November, December of 2020 or 2021 to the reservation from Seattle. And my part of the reservation, which had very Few didn't have much infrastructure. It was lit up with Internet broadband. And I came home and I thought, oh my goodness, I can work from home. So I moved home from Seattle to the middle of the Navajo Nation and started working full time with John. Because at that point we thought, well, Navajo Nation had all this ARPA money, billions of dollars. They had like allocated some 500 million for broadband expansion across the Navajo Nation. And we. And it came to my incredibly rural place that I live. And that's where we sort of had.
The initial say, you're two hours from a cheeseburger.
I am, exactly. Yeah. And so at that point we thought, well, we can figure we can take advantages and leverage this as a way to leapfrog over all of these federal constraints to actually bring jobs with like low capital costs, all of these things. Right. That create these challenges. And so that was the idea. And that's where we began to really start jumping in with within the Navajo Nation. And as a result, we were able to work in coordination with the Navajo Nation President's office. We've been working with the Navajo Nation Tribal Council, Matter of fact, they're working finalizing an appropriation package to support what we're doing across the Navajo Nation. Yeah. And so we partnered with both the tribal colleges, different communities we've been working with, different tribally owned enterprises, different private sector enterprises and companies we're coordinating now with some high schools that serve the Navajo people and just different organizations. So we built a broad coalition around this and are increasingly cooperating with the Navajo Nation to fulfill what they had passed their appropriation package called the Navajo Nation Workforce Transformation Initiative. So as an effort to move the Navajo Nation towards credential and skill based hiring and. Yeah, so that's where we are sort of in the throes of that, and that's where we are right now.
One other thing I'd just add really quickly about that is in talking with Moroni and getting to know some of the folks you know on the reservation, one of our key colleagues and allies in this process has been delegate Carl Slater. And he's a member of the Navajo Council. And he's actually presented with Moroni and our team in a few different contexts about this project. So he's a big champion of it. But one of the things that we heard loud and clear at the very beginning was please don't be like all of those other organizations that come in and just try to get some of our money, do a three to six month project, claim victory and leave. We knew and Plus, Moroni and I are policy geeks. We knew that this was not going to be something that you could fix in half a year. We actually mapped this out as a three to five year project and we're about 16, 18 months in on that. And so as Moroni talks about, you know, all of these things we've done, if you think about the flywheel effect, you know, we've, we've gotten the flywheel to start moving. You can imagine how new and just different this concept is for the employers, for the schools to get them kind of on, you know, moving in this direction of thinking about skills based hiring, skills based ups, you know, education. So a lot of the groundwork lane has been around some of those key concepts and ideas.
So I want to dig in on this just and a couple reflections before I ask this question, which is it strikes me that one, your focus on individuals stuck in domestic abuse situations echoes actually one of the big findings we had in you know, choosing college, why individuals choose more education. But also in our upcoming book Job Moves, why people switch employers, which is a lot of times they're trying to get out of a really bad situation. And that doesn't necessarily mean employment. It could be a domestic situation. In many cases they're trying to get out of that and it drives that push, if you will, drives a lot of behavior. And then the second observation, just Moroni, as you were talking about the broadband infrastructure to leapfrog, it strikes me that you're tackling, you know, John, our friend Clay Christensen stuff, right? With the, with the disruption. That's non consumption there, right? The alternative was nothing at all. You've built this enabling technology, you're able to leapfrog. I'd love you to dig in on that piece of it because I'm curious on two fronts. One, who are the companies that these individuals are now able to work with and who are you helping partner them with? Number one, who are taking advantage of this infrastructure and two, how does this help them still get out of those domestic, you know, abuse situations if maybe they don't have to go anywhere as much. Right. Like they, because, because they're able to enable the broadband. What I can hear people asking what does that really look like on the ground for me to now have a job? But out, out of this bad situation, I'll let whichever one of you wants to take that jump in.
You want to go first.
You may know more, a bit, a bit more about the first part of the question then.
I mean.
We won't get into all of the minutiae of what it's like to try to roll out a multi.
Sure, yeah. Don't worry about the logistics. Yeah.
But as you think about Moroni's prime example, Right. Like, he was not able to live on the reservation and work in a. In the field that he's educated to work in and have the impact he's having. Before there was broadband, and so now he can do that. Okay, so if that's, if that's the germ of an idea or of an opportunity as broadband rolls out, what we're doing is we're saying, okay, what are the jobs that currently exist on the reservation that can be done hybrid or remotely? And there are some of these jobs that have been chronically vacant just because for whatever reason, the employers can't find people who are qualified today for that job. And so we're going to these. Moroni mentioned these tribal enterprises. There are businesses essentially that are owned by the tribe. So there's a gaming and tourism enterprise. There's a tribal enterprise around housing. So we've gone to those entities and said, okay, what are the jobs? Let's, you know, we talked about that. You know, dig deep and map the jobs we've done. That one, for example, is at the Navajo Housing Authority that has this hundreds of millions of dollars of housing money. They have had, I think it's 25 construction project manager jobs vacant for a couple of years.
And those.
Until those jobs are filled, they can't spend this money on housing. So, so we've mapped that map those jobs. Now, those jobs are probably hybrid jobs. You know, some days I could work at home. Some days I'm going to, you know, as a construction project manager, I'm going to have to be out and about. But it just unlocks the door to a new set of employees or potential employees for these jobs that didn't exist before. And I would also add, it also opens up the opportunity for remote education. So, yeah, I want to be a construction project manager. Not only could I potentially do that job remotely or in a hybrid way, but I can do my upskilling remotely as opposed to driving a couple hours each way every day.
Well, and that's really interesting, right, because then that's also helping fill that demand, I imagine, for 35,000 more houses that you were, you were, you were mentioning.
As well, you know, and that's exactly why we focused on that job first, because it did have kind of this potential domino effect.
Yeah, well, and there's a lot of research that efosa Jomo and others have done around the importance of really building jobs for the local community. If you're trying to really do development. Moroni, stay with this for a moment. In terms of the. Then how does. What's the downstream effect? I have a job now or I'm on track to get a job. How does that help me with the domestic challenges that I may be locked in?
Right. So, so, so let's back up just a bit with, with sort of what Aspirability has proposed and has been working with the colleges is also to provide sort of these wraparound services. So like mental health services, what have you, child care. Navajo Technical University offers that to a lot of their staff and their students as well. And so part of the proposal, what we're doing is also working and tapping into those resources for those individuals who are working. And so what happens then is that that person has the training and is able to work from home. They're able to get an income. I mean, just. And, and that income gives them what they need to break away financially from their abuser. What they call like financial abuse, I think, is they're able to break away because they're no longer reliant on that person and they have then the capacity of other options to find other housing to live in. Or. And so what that also does is obviously that has an impact on crime. It enables the police officers to focus their attention on other things that need to happen. And so there's all these down the stream consequences. But one of the more significant economic consequences for the Navajo Nation is that of every dollar that is made in the Navajo Nation that a Navajo citizen like I make, 30% stays on the Navajo Nation and 70% leaks off to these border towns. And in part because of all of this underdevelopment and the constraints around it. But what ends up happening is one of the other downstream effects is that person now who was in that situation is able to leave their. Leave that situation. But at the same time, 30% of her spending is now spent in the Navajo Nation, which contributes directly back to the Navajo. That's one extra person spending additional 30% of their income in the Navajo Nation. And so we've done some estimates into the couple about the potential impact of what 50 employees at $45,000 a year in the Navajo Nation would have. Right? And so there are significant consequences and really returns for the Navajo Nation in multiple ways. And, but, but the down. The downstream consequences, positive consequences for leaving a domestic violence situation is it breaks that cycle of trauma, right? For generations and yeah, super, super interesting.
I'm, I'm curious. I mean, just hearing you describe that. It's the good old fashioned multiplier effect that economists love to talk about. But I, I guess the other part of it that I'm really struck by is, is what you were describing. The, you know, the politicians come in, they. Not to rip on your former field, but you know, they, they pass the reg, the money, whatever it is, and then they sort of wash their hands, walk off declaring victory. To your point, this is, this is to be a sustained commitment. This isn't a top down thing. It's a real bottoms up piece. I'm just sort of curious. Both of your reflections as we wrap up here. What's been the biggest surprise to you that you could not have guessed had you not been, you know, Moroni based in that community? John, really doing the work in the community? This bottoms up approach. What's the thing you would not have guessed or that you've learned that surprised you that you could have only figured out by really committing that three to five years and being on the ground?
Yeah.
John, why don't you go first?
Yeah, yeah, maybe I'll throw one out. One of the things that we started trying to wrap our hands around very early on was how many vacant jobs are there on the reservation? Because nobody knew. And kind of the conventional wisdom was, well, the jobs that do exist are government jobs or public school or Indian health services jobs. So kind of. And that was largely the perspective. And we couldn't go to Burning Glass or, you know, monster because there wasn't a geographic job board for the reservation. So we actually had to create one and do a census of what jobs exist. And it turns out there are about. Maroni was our last count, about 3,500 jobs vacant on the reservation. And about half of them are private sector. And that has kind of blown people's minds. They're like, oh, wow, we had no idea. And so now we're able to look at the, you know, the distribution of jobs across those and start helping create a strategic plan for the schools to say, oh, it looks like we need project managers not just here, but across multiple industries. Let's start being strategic about deploying continuing ed and professional education resources. That's, that's one example. We just wouldn't have known unless we dug in on that.
Myrna, you get the last word on what you've learned by.
All right, so sort of going off of what John talked about, just one of the things that I, that, that I. It Wasn't really surprised. I'll share that. The last one, but with just the, the. I knew the Navajo Nation had a lot of data, and we talk a lot about lack of data. And so when I first landed, I'm like the Navajo Nation. A lot of data. We can figure this out. And at least for me, there was no labor market data being collected by any of the divisions or departments of Navajo government that we had interacted with. And so that jobs board that we created through aspirability has become the first informal data collection mechanism for labor data in the Navajo Nation. We've written reports. And so that for me was, was one of the bigger surprises. But the big surprise for me was even though that I'm from here is, is sort of like the, the temporality aspect of it all, like the, the tempo of decision making and thinking and, and, and, and also what really got me was, was the, was the, the impact of, of the capacity of the Navajo Nation government workers. And not that they're bad, it's just that they've lacked the training, they've lacked the direction. And so as a result of that, there's. It moves very, very, very slow. And then you mix in the local concept of time and their notion that, oh, if we miss this round, it'll come back again next year, so don't worry about it.
Well, I'd add in, you know, it's the very problem we're talking about. Many of the, I guess what you call like mid level management jobs in Navajo government are vacant. So the people who do have jobs, one of the reasons things are slow is because they're doing 27 things at once.
Right, right.
So for success, that's a lot in some way.
Yeah, yeah. So. So for me, it was, it was just. I was surprised. Even though I grew up here, worked with Navajo Nation multiple, in multiple roles, and I was a bureaucrat for many years, served in the President's cabinet. I was ahead of the natural resource. So I thought I knew bureaucracy until I got to the private sector and tried to engage it on that side. It was that which is a whole different ball game for me. Wow. Yeah.
Wow.
Both of you, just tremendous. Thanks for the work you're doing. I'm just struck by how the vertical integration you've had to do into places you never would have guessed just by being on the ground and starting to fill some of this essential parts of the picture, if you will, and what you've built. But Moroni John and aspirability. Thanks for the work. You're doing in Navajo Nation. And thanks for joining us in future of education.
Thank you.
Have a great day.
You bet. We'll be back next time.
