What's Next for Skills-Based Hiring

Skills based hiring is all the rage today, at least in the media, as we read headlines about states and employers dropping degree requirements for all kinds of jobs. Yet we have evidence that advertising jobs without a degree is one thing. Actually hiring people without a degree is something totally different. So today on this special bonus episode of Future youe we'll dig in deeper on skills based hiring in this recording we did in front of a live studio audience at the Jobs for the Future Horizons Conference this summer.

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I'm Michael Horn and I'm Jeff Salingo. Jobs for the Future is a non profit focused on worker mobility. It's known as JFF and they hosted their annual Horizons conference in D.C. in July. I was there without Michael and I did this live recording of the podcast. Joining me was Kenan Harrison, who serves as Head of Corporate Workforce Partnerships for ets, and Tina Gridiron, who serves as Chief Equity and Impact Officer at act. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. So welcome everyone. Welcome to the Horizons conference here in D.C. put on by Jobs for the Future JFF. I'm Jeff Salingo, host of the Future youe podcast and today we're going to be talking a lot about skills based hiring and what it means for not only the future of the workforce, but for the future of education. We know that employers and governments are leaning into skills based hiring as they shift their hiring practices and remove degree requirements. I live in the state of Maryland, which is one of the states that have removed degree requirements for state jobs. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, another state that's done it, along with Virginia, Utah and a number of other states over the last couple of years. Years now we know from the research though, while degreeless job ads are up, degreeless hiring is not necessarily kept pace with all the discussion about this. And so our discussion today here is going to talk a little bit about how employers can better assess the skills that job candidates have. How can candidates better understand what skills are needed for most jobs and what is the role of higher education in education in general, our post secondary education system in building partnerships with industry to ensure that students have the necessary skills and workers have the necessary skills to succeed with or without a degree. I would love to welcome my guests to the Future you podcast today. We have with us Tina Gridiron who is the Chief Equity and Impact Officer at Act Welcome, Tina.

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

And we have Keenan Harrison, who serves as head of corporate workforce partners at ets. Welcome.

Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here.

So I want to start with talking about the college degree first. Let's start with we're going to talk a lot about degreeless hiring and doing away with degree requirements. But I'm really fascinated by the fact that if you look at surveys, for example, among young Americans In Generation Z, 45% say that a high school diploma is all you need today to ensure financial security. And we're seeing that play out in enrollment with fewer high school graduates, of course, going on to pursue a college degree, whether that's a two year or four year degree. I'm just trying to get a sense of what's happening because college basically Post World War II on, was always seen as a ticket to success. And we saw that through the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and 90s, even through the early part of this century. And then over the last decade, college enrollment has started to drop. So what's happening? Why is the degree in your mind not seen as it used to be, as this ticket to success and as carrying this incredible currency in the job market? And Tina, why don't we start with you?

So it's a great question and a great moment that we're in right now. I believe that there's a communication gap with young people right now in understanding the long term implications of the choices that they can make. What we know is that the Pew Charitable Trust, the University of Georgetown center for Education in the Workforce, has done study after studying to indicate that the long term benefits of a two year or four year degree still has value and makes a difference, particularly in downturn economy times the 2008 moment, we saw a great rebounding of individuals who had credentials and degrees 2 year and 4 year. So we know that there's data to inform that if you make the choice to do a two year or four year degree that you can have positive outcomes in your lifetime. We know that that's out there and that's available. What we don't see is young people connecting with that and seeing it in real time for them as they're making their decision, transitioning out of high school, whether it's because of the cost, that they see the sticker price of the cost of college or of a university or even an open access institution, that sticker price is daunting. And thought of getting a loan and being saddled with that debt for the long term is daunting for many young people, many of whom have to be independent and might be individuals who are parents themselves and trying to keep a household together. So the realities surrounding what a traditional age student has to navigate in this day and age might be different than what they were navigating in the 1940s and 1950s. 50s. The responsibilities, the long term impact. And we know that adult learners, those with some college and no degree, or those with no college who have not taken advantage of two year and four year degrees have to think through lots of implications. So there's a communication gap around the value and the opportunity that's available there, as well as the reality of the current economic challenges and responsibilities that young people are facing where they are navigating that normal in unique ways.

So I want to dig a little bit deeper on that for just one second before I get to Keenan. We had Terrell Haskell on the podcast a couple of months ago looking at data that the Gates foundation was underwriting about the value of higher ed. And one of the interesting findings to me was about this short term, long term thing. Because even when people who either went to college or didn't go to college, right, either one, when they, they knew the long term benefits of higher education, right, they know the long term payoff of the degree. But even those who decided to go to college weren't quite sure that the short term benefits were worth the long term payoff of that. In other words, the opportunity cost, right, it's going to cost me a lot of money right now. And I don't, I know what the payoff is in the long run, but I don't know if I want to get out of the workforce right now or I want to skip the workforce right now. In fact, as a community college president in Florida told me, we're not competing against other colleges, we're competing against Amazon and others who can pay an 18 year old or a 20 year old or a 24 year old $25, $30 an hour and by the way comes with education benefits. So communications, I agree with you is an issue. But how do you get over this? Even when they know the long term payoff is worth it, how do you get them to say in the short term it's something you need to do?

So I would suggest that higher education has an opportunity in front of it as a sector to not require students to do the either or route, either employment or higher education, but the both and route. How can I continue to upskill and gather real life experiences and in the work world while also going to a higher education institution, whether it be a two year or four year. How do we make the experience of navigating higher education more user friendly, student friendly, learner centered, so that it is laddering as you go along and you are able to have your foot in both arenas? That is not a message, I believe that higher education has shared with students writ large, that it is a both and that we will make it available to you to stay in a career, career opportunity while also going to.

It's also not a system. It's also not a system we have necessarily designed. Right, we.

Fair enough.

We've designed it as a linear system. So, Keenan, what do you think's going on here? Why, why do you think that, you know, after essentially generations of college being seen as this ticket and when I say college, I say post secondary education writ large, seen as a ticket to, you know, a good life, it's not necessarily seen that way by, by this generation. Is it a communications issue or is there something deeper going on?

I think there's a communications issue. I think it would be hard to solve the communications issue without the right data and without proof. Tina, a lot of the points you made are exactly the points that I would agree with. There is a very significant cost issue we look at just by itself. We look at that issue and we say, all right, well the cost of education, the cost of higher education and traditional four year institution has outstripped inflation by a huge amount since outstripped wage growth by a huge amount. That right there is going to make it challenging. We have a huge empowerment issue. We heard on the stage a few minutes ago that today's young people are facing generational changes every two and a half to three years. That's daunting. That's daunting. It was a challenge when it was every seven years. It was a challenge when it was every 10 years. It's more of a challenge now.

And when you say that, you say that plays out in like, again, why should I invest? Whatever I'm going to invest? If it's going to work, the workforce is going to be changed.

If it's going to be obsolete, if it's going to be out of date, if it's going to be. And how many publications have we seen over the last 10 years saying exactly that, saying 96% of what today's computer science graduates learn in class will be obsolete by the time they graduate? All right, well, maybe we're controlling for the wrong data. Maybe we're controlling for the wrong Standards. Maybe we should be looking to higher education and to the workforce development ecosystem broadly, the learning ecosystem broadly, for an understanding of what people's potential is, an understanding of what people can do and how they can use durable skills, how they can use cross cutting skills, how they can use skills that aren't just soft skills. Because while understanding how to use ChatGPT to do whatever it is that you're doing may not be a durable skill, understanding how to use AI to be effective in a role absolutely is. Conceptual understanding of these new tools is absolutely a place for higher education to play. I think I would add that employers have a huge role to play here and to the point Tina just made, absolutely. Employers have an opportunity to leverage the only intentional and at scale workforce development ecosystem that exists in this country today, which is higher education, to develop the workforce that they have internally. So there's an upskilling, there's a reskilling, there's of course the infinite problem of how you get more people from this development ecosystem into jobs. But what about the 39 million people who are underemployed, who have debt and no degree? What about the Hundreds, I think JFF 138 million people who don't have a good job in this country, We've already failed them. Right. We have to serve them too. So there's a huge opportunity, I think, for us to help people understand and help people feel empowered that these jobs of this future is possible for them. Do it with data and quantifiably say your skills look just like the skills of somebody who's making $80,000 a year. Guess what, there's a pathway. And, and here it is.

Yeah. And I think a lot of this happens in silos. Right. Just as an aside, when I walked here, in here this morning, you know, normally when I go to a higher ed conference, there's a decent amount of people I know I will admit that there's a lot of people here I didn't really recognize because I think a lot of it is like there's a, there's a world of the workforce and there's a world of education and those two shall not always meet. And it's really a shame. It really is a shame.

In response to that, we're seeing several communities across the country that are finding ways to braid the higher education and employer network together in collective impact style collaboration. We have work ready communities that are 560 plus communities across the country who say we want a community college leader, a four year institution leader, several employers, the work One centers the local public leadership to come together and tell us what are your goals for the future around economic development, talent development, strengthening your economy and how might this collective approach make a difference for learners, the future.

You and Tina, I love the word you used, braid. Braid them together. Right? Because I think we often talk about it as a seamless system and things like that. I like the word braid because it really allows each other group to have still their own identity but still work together.

I think that's such an important point to make. This is one ecosystem, this is a continuum. We always, we use these words and we, we use them academically and we say, oh yeah, it's the workforce continuum. It's the learning to work ecosystem. It's the, it's true. The skills that you need for a job versus the skills that you need for any other opportunity, learning or otherwise are fundamentally the same skills that you have or don't have, that you can develop or not develop. That we have to do a better job of measuring, understanding and helping individuals communicate to the opportunity stakeholders they're engaging with. Whether that's admissions or a job or an internship or whatever the opportunity is, we have this ability to do it. I mean at ETS we're developing the capability for employers to say directly to the institutions. This is what we want. Yeah, this is what we want down to the sub dimension level.

And I want to talk a little bit about what your two organizations are doing to try to solve this problem. We'll get to that. You brought up earlier, Tina. The either or the both and. Right. I mean fundamentally this seems to be a problem where post secondary education is just not meeting the needs of learners. I'm going to use the word learners. I'll probably go back and forth between learners and students. I sometimes think when we think students we think of like full time younger people, you know, out of high school pursuing education. That's not the majority learner today. We know that the majority students. So let me use the word learner as well. But it's fundamentally not meeting them where they are. Right. They, they want something that's affordable, they want something that's flexible as you said. Right. They want to combine work and learning. They want to be able to have hands on experiential learning and they want to also see the relevancy of what they're learning. Is that the fundamental problem we're facing here?

That's fair. I would add. They also want an experience that they can afford that is not going to break the bank and cause them to no longer be able to afford a home or cause them to have to delay getting a car, cause them to have some financial challenges down the road.

So that's a both end issue, right? So if colleges just say, okay, we'll provide all these services, but at the same price, not necessarily solving the problem,

there's still going to be some tension and friction with today's student. Today's student that is over the age of 24, that is trying to support their family, that is realizing that there is an economic challenges afoot with new technology they have to grapple with. What we know is that today's student is very diverse and has a lot of demands in front of them. Higher education has the opportunity to meet students in a way that is new and fresh and unique. And we know that there are institutions out there, open access institutions that are thinking about the long term opportunities for individuals for social mobility and economic mobility beyond just the credential or degree. We know that organizations like Getting Past GO are helping state leaders to identify what are the ways that we can lift up skills and competencies as a way of supporting a student in their learner journey, wherever that learning takes place and give them the opportunity to demonstrate that skill and that strength for the work world or for further education. It doesn't have to be an either or both and can work. And we do have some leaders out

there that are exploring it to that end. Right. Learners want a career. Why would we spend all of that? I mean there are a lot of high minded ideals. I grew up in higher education, literally on college campuses. So I have a, maybe a unique view of it. But people want a career, they want a sustainable career. That's the point for the vast majority of people who take at great personal risk, take on the opportunity cost that you talked about. Almost 20 million people a year, they're looking for outcomes and they want an ROI or an ROE turn on education. And a lot of people aren't finding them. I think the really significant opportunity that we have now that we didn't have three or four years ago is at scale the ability to prove to people that they can get that no matter who they are, where they come from, regardless of background, and that employers want them. They want the right people, they want the right skills and they're having a hard time getting that signal, but they want them. And I would just say that it has to be a pull and a push. It has to be a pull and a push. And especially from an employer perspective.

Right. I mean my thought on this Is that one of the reasons why the degree doesn't necessarily carry the currency as it once did is because there's a lot of noise around that signal. It's still, still pretty strong signal, right, that you're going to finish something you start. And it's an easy way for employers to hire as a proxy for skills, but it really is a proxy. So let's talk a little bit about skills based hiring because it has been in the news a lot over the last couple of years. I'm always curious, like, what does that really mean to you? Right. What skills are important? How should, how should one get them? And what factors do you think are driving these skills over a formal education degree program? So let's talk about, you know, what skills are important, how can you get them? Is that through traditional providers or other things? And what's really driving this movement?

Yeah.

So I am happy to jump in. We know that there are quite a few providers out there helping individuals secure different skills. What we know is that oftentimes the learner, as they are looking to different providers are not clear about whether those skills skills will be transferable to an employment opportunity that provides a livable wage or to further education. So there's a bit of a wild wild west out there right now in this whole skills and competencies and credentials and certifications movement. And the learner is experiencing, I would say, a lot of noise in that space.

Well, so is that, is that a safe thing to throw the learner into that wild west?

Well, I would say that it's an opportunity for the learner if we are as educators in this room committed to providing navigation tools for the learner to help understand that noise or to dissect that noise or to get clarity within the noise. What we know is that the credential engine has indicated that there's quite a few providers out there that there's an opportunity for further clarity around the impact of those skills and credentials. We also know that there is organizations like Opportunity at Work that are lifting up when an individual does have a strong skills base that they should be allowed to demonstrate their skill in the work world and not be held by a paper ceiling that keeps them from accessing a middle income or livable wage opportunity. So we have a bit of a friction moment where the skills based hiring conversation is getting momentum and we want to continue that momentum. We have an opportunity to encourage our employers and also to encourage higher education to join in that conversation so that they are actually supporting students along that journey. That if I show My skills in a military service or in a volunteer service or in the Peace Corps, that that skill getting past GO is helping more state leaders to do this. But that that skill should give me an opportunity to demonstrate my strength in the work world automatically without the 2 year or 4 degree if it's available.

What about the skill. What about the skills developed from babysitting my young siblings? What about the skills developed because, you know, I volunteer at the ice skating rink? What about the skills developed because I'm building a house for Habitat for Humanity?

So how. Okay, so, right. So people have all these skills, right? How do we certify that in a way that's trusted by.

It's a great question. I think that there are. ETS is known for research. Let me throw a little research at you. We did a. We released a study called the Human Progress Report and stay tuned, there's another one coming. We surveyed 17,000 people and the top five skills necessary for life success. I'll read them out here so I don't mess them up. Communication, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and these are in order. Technical skills, time management, perseverance. Tied for fifth by the way.

All things that we used to think were embedded in a college degree.

And that actually gets to the crux of the difference between verification and validation and the importance of both.

So talk about the difference between those.

Different people have different definitions. When we talk about verified skills, we talk about a number of different third parties that do skills verification. Accreditors of course, certifying bodies, industry associations, et cetera, et cetera. The very institution of higher learning itself, state governments, et cetera. And that's great. The interesting thing about skill verification at scale, skill extraction, skill inference recommendations is that it is faster, it is more accurate in many cases and it is a lot better than what we have had in the past. The advent of skill extraction, skill inference capabilities, which ETS uses but Likecast and others are advocates of and have been doing for a while. Really, really important. You can do all of that with enough people in an unlimited budget. There's no novel data. That's the, that's the. It's faster, it's better than it was. Great. Adding skill validation, adding the validation of direct measurement of skills for people where you can't get any signal, there's nothing to extract from. They're from underrepresented, underserved, under resourced, under opportunity populations where. How do you prove that you did this in an internship if you can't get an internship because you can't afford It, Right, right. So being able to directly measure skills and combine that with, if it's available, the speed, precision and accuracy of AI powered data analytics around skill extraction, around verified skills. So that's a degree or otherwise gives us an incredibly powerful picture and gives us the ability to actually get signal on people, huge populations of people where we had nothing before. The cool thing about that is not only can we get that in signal to the employers, we can turn around to the individual and say, hey, we can prove quantifiably repeatedly with the scientific method, the data says you can do this. And the reason we can prove it is because we know what people who are doing it look like from a skills perspective and you match. It's an empowering prospect.

We are hearing from 30,000 employers across the country that acts workkeys and national career Readiness Certificate is a certification that they value in hiring individuals. Those with some college and no degree, those with no college and no degree, and yet the skills and competencies to show that they can do the job. So the National Career Readiness Certificate is one form or one tool that can be used and is being used in over 560 communities around the country. 30,000 employers already recognize it and the American Council on Education has even said you can secure college credit through different levels of success on the National Career Readiness Certificate. So it is one mechanism, there are many others out there, but it's one mechanism for individuals to demonstrate what they know and are able to do even if they don't go the traditional two year and four year college and university route. We recommend that you look at all different pathways that are available to you and whatever credential or certification you choose should be able to ladder towards additional workforce training or additional higher education engagement. You should never end up in a cul de sac with nowhere to go with that credential or that certification. The stacking and the laddering of credentials should be foremost on a learner's mind as they think about not just what they need right now, but what might be available for the future. So what we are excited about is what employers are telling us they are using the National Career Readiness Certificate for, for an opportunity for entry level engagement as well as continued skill development and strengthening.

Okay, so let's not let employers off the hook here though, right? Because employers say that they want skills, right? They want to hire workers with these skills and they'll maybe even outline them, they'll even say how they can be certified. But the evidence so far shows that while, and if you looked at all this data LinkedIn and others are showing huge increase in job ads without college or without higher education. Some sort of post secondary education degree. But then when you actually see how much hiring is being done, much, much lower. So why the disconnect? What's happening?

It's risk. So if you think about the. I spent four years in the workforce development industry prior to coming to ETS and so I dealt with the this nightmare on a daily basis. It's risk. The people who make the hires are not the people who sign the MOUs and the pledges and the it doesn't trickle down. And there are reasons for that. There are intentional reasons in my opinion, but we don't need to get into that. There are also reasons around job security and around risk. So if a hiring manager. I have an English degree, so we'll use me as an example. I come to a hiring manager in Charlotte, I went to the University of South Carolina and I say I have an English degree. What does that mean to that hiring manager? It means nothing, right? Hey, the prestige of your institution and the fact that you could finish a thing. Good, good, great. Of course it means more to that to us, the people in this room, the people in the industry, we all understand that they don't necessarily understand that it's hard to make that hiring decision based on anything other than the same things that you've hired for always because if you don't, and this is true, if the hiring manager makes too many wrong hires, they lose their job. So what we're on a mission to do is create an ecosystem that is not just better but you de risk. So de risk and so much more efficient that the status quo is non viable that if you don't participate in a repeatable data backed.

So what does that look like? So what does that system look like?

There's a. It starts with what we call skills audit. You have to determine what the baseline is. So you have to determine what you are hiring for. What do you want? And I alluded to this earlier, we can actually help employers say on a roll by role basis. Not just roll by role, roll by role, team by team. This role in this team versus this role in this team. Same role, different teams, different skill needs. Marginally right to determine that and then make individual matching decisions from a talent pool to a role that is higher likelihood to retain better job performance, better experience for the employee, which of course is a self fulfilling prophecy. Extremely efficient compared to the regular process. Imagine a world where somebody is in February of their senior year of college or October of their senior year of high school maybe, and they get 15 interview offers based on their skills profile that they get to choose based on the merits of the job, which individual offer they want to go pursue. So it gives us the ability to flip the model and help employers compete for talent as a scarce resource, which is what they are, instead of the other way around. It also gives us the ability to at the same time, and we have use cases to prove this, save employers millions of dollars per role per year, inefficiency gain and increase diversity by upwards of 45 to 50% on a roll by roll basis, depending on the role, depending on the area of the country. So there's a really significant opportunity to do this. And it's a novel layer of data that isn't currently used, but exists and hasn't been measured or conveyed effectively.

I would just say that I want to underscore the risk comment that you made two or three times. When we think about the employer, the hiring manager and their network of people that they know, there is the adage where people say it's not what you know, it's who you know. And how many of us have secured our next job not necessarily based on what was on our resume, but because the person to my right or to my left put in a good word for me so that my resume could rise to the top. So we also know that the networking that happens, whether it be at a two year institution or a four year institution, is a way for individuals to, to find good hires and they want someone else to validate that. If I choose Tina for this and she doesn't have a degree, that she has all the skills, how do we make sure that our skills based individuals who didn't go the traditional route but are still well qualified for the position, how do we get them in the right network so that they get the same kind of informal advancement as well as the formal advancement, they get the nod so that their resume rises to the top of the pile where the individual hiring manager feels like they have some protection around the risk, that they don't just go for the prestige hire related to your college or university, but they're trusting.

I like this idea of de risking for the employer, but how about de risking it also for the employee and the learner? Right? So I was talking to somebody earlier today here and we were talking about skills based hiring. We were talking about certificates and other certified credentials and we were talking about like okay, you could take somebody, you could take say a frontline worker who now has Supervisory wants to do supervisory work. So they get a credential and then they start wanting to move up and eventually they are going to hit a position that does require a college degree maybe within this organization now, maybe let's say for now that that will require a college degree. The question is as I'm moving up in order to get that college degree, even if these certificates stack up to some sort of degree, I'm probably going to need to do some workplace learning or I'm going to have to go to college or something like that. But that job is going to come up pretty quickly and I'm going to need to know, and this is the de risk part, I'm going to need to know six months ahead or a year ahead or two years ahead. Hey, that's the job I want. I might be one or two levels from there yet, but I'm going to need to get a degree. And by the way, I'm working, I'm a single parent and I have to figure out how I'm going to pay for this and do all this to me. There's also a risk at the learner side as well. We need to have some sort of compass in order for them to know if I do these five things that will lead to this job and then if I want that next job up, I'm going to have to do these three other things. And I need time to do that.

Yeah, absolutely.

You need time I think and money and resources.

Money and resources. You need to be empowered to believe that it's possible in the first place. That's a huge problem. We talk about the signal to noise ratio. It's not just about the entry level, it's about, we call it talent pyramid management. Succession planning is another word for it. That's not a one sided equation. It takes two to tango. You need a learning and development manager, you need a hiring manager. You need these individuals on the HR side who are saying, okay, how to identify who is the right person for upward organizational upper mobility. You also need boundless talent mobility because there are going to be more than one. There are going to be situations where more than one person deserves a promotion. How do you identify where to send those individuals? Well, the truth is that there are jobs over here in this part of the bank and there's an entirely different department over here in this part of the bank. That is a job that requires the exact same skills. The exact same skills. But you can't get from there to here, right? Or from here to there. Right now, even though the jobs require the same skills and we can prove it. Right? So there's a really amazing opportunity with this new novel layer of data that's validated, that is verified, that's provable, that's backed by science to be able to say, hey, you don't just have upward mobility, you have multi directional upper mobility. You can go up this way, that way, these ways. It's empowering. And then you also have to help those individuals understand, hey, what are the skills? Where are you under skilled and where do you need to build and then provide learning pathways for those individuals? Now one of the big problems that we have inside of employers and reskilling and upskilling and empowering these individuals is that it's a highly fragmented ecosystem system. There are all sorts of different education as a benefit players and platforms and this, that and the other, with some of that skill extraction, skill inference capability that I spoke about earlier, we as a community, not just ets, we as a community now have the ability to actually break down a learning experience into the skills you will gain. Because what is a job, what is a person, what is a role, what is it in the context of business? What is a learning opportunity other than a bundle of skills, either in theory or applied? So if you can intentionally build upward mobility pathways, you're not just empowering people, you're also making it really easy for the employers to say yes.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, we recorded this conversation at JFF's Horizons conference in D.C. in July. We did so in front of a live audience and so we had a few minutes at the end for questions. So here is the audience segment of the episode.

Hi, I'm Kelly Morrison with EdAssist and I have a question you said there about showing delight to where people can move in their career. How do we do that in a way that doesn't make it a promise and leave someone disappointed when they've completed their education and they don't get that job?

Great question.

That's a great question. I think it takes an ecosystem. We at ETS are providing the tools, right? And that's what we want to do. That's our history. We want to stay true to the, hey, we're going to provide the research, the innovation, the tools for you to do these things and make decisions, of course will help you. But I do think that employers to some extent, if they are taking the, making the investment in education as a benefit, in the case of Edison Store or upskilling generally, right, Executive ed, all the way down to upskilling platforms that are very bite sized. I think they're ready to make the investment for a reason. I would say that there is an inherent risk anytime you spend money on anything that isn't a short bet. Now, there is an interesting way that if you're empowering individuals and you're saying we're going to flip the model, we've identified your durable skill profile as someone who will be good at this job that you don't have yet. What we need you to get is the technical ability to do the job. It's actually quite a bit easier to obtain, not obtain to assess improvement technical ability than it is to assess improve non technical ability durable skills. So we're trying to bring the latter to the forefront and allow the, we call them soft selects in the industry I used to be in, allow individual people inside of companies to soft select and say, hey, we are committing to you that if you do this we will get you that job and it makes it possible.

By the way, I agree that there are no guarantees in life, but education is such a costly endeavor. Like when we buy a house, we expect to live under a roof, right? When we buy a car, we expect it to get us from point A to point B. Education should do more than get us a piece of paper. In my mind.

Agree.

Yes, right here.

One of the.

Sorry, I work for an ed tech company. We have a software that provides supports career services. So my question is kind of around that one of the ways that, you know, higher ed has what we focused is immense focus on career services. That's where all their money is going. If you are receiving public funding, Florida is a great example, you are required to show your roi. So how in your perspective can career services professionals at the community college, at the small school, at the large school like University of Florida, kind of connect those dots, bring those skills out? Because I think a lot of career services professionals that I talk to, they're in the business of sort of storytelling too. But then there's a disconnect with the employer of actually like hiring those students. So I'm just curious on your perspectives on the role career services can play because I think that's a good intersection.

I believe that there is a lot of research opportunity in tracking and connecting what your alumni are doing in the work world over time. So if you have different researchers who are getting their PhDs that are looking for data sets either through LinkedIn or alumni engagement opportunities, tell the story of what your alumni are doing in the work world so that more students can be drawn to your institution to see that your institution is being intentional. What we heard from Raj Chetty with Opportunity Insights and their research when an institution is intentional around the career engagement, the apprenticeship opportunity, the outside of classroom experiences for students, they have upward mobility later on in life. There are good things that happen for an individual as they navigate. So you're not alone as an institution that is trying to navigate this. We're all in this together. But there are at least some interesting data points. I turn people over to the Opportunity Insights website as one research structure to begin to think about how to track social mobility or economic mobility for the institution. And I would look to students to hold their institutions accountable. Ask the right questions Whether you're an adult student or traditional age student. Ask do you track and stay engaged with your alumni past graduation? What are some of the resources that you would make available to me as I am going not just from my first job after graduating, but my second and third job, how robust is the network that your institution is providing for me for the future?

We have time for one more quick question.

Yes, Charmaine, here I am with Year Hop Inc. And we're Workforce Training Program working with 40,000 plus alums, etc. We're all about skills first and we work with community college. I think I want to also put out there. So one of the things that we tell our students the ABC attitude, behavior, communication. So I heard your list of five. Right. But from the working with students directly that behavior and attitude will get you fired.

That's. That's flat.

I mean it's great to have the skills, but we also hone in about how, you know, the 360 of all of you.

Right.

And so it'd be interesting to see how assessments are putting that.

That's an interesting. Right. How do you measure attitude and behavior?

Yeah. And actually I love that. Yeah. And I mentioned 20 sub dimensions we're measuring among other things. Right. We have a huge battery. I don't want to talk too much about product or whatever, but we have a huge battery of assessments, one of which is measuring just that. And the cool thing about this is we, we call it loading. But you can measure attitude, you can measure personality traits, you can measure skills qualities, you can measure a variety of other things. And you can over time with longitudinal data study, which is what ETS is very good at, you can determine repeatedly which dimensions combined in which way will be valid and repeatedly representative of the attitude of an individual. And so depending on how you want to display that, it just depends on the audience you're talking to. Right? So the audience of a higher ed institution versus an employer versus a manufacturing employer or a bank or whatever, that's going to differ. But the actual fundamental capability to measure that is here, it's usable, it's significant, and it actually is driving real results. The thing that's changed is the ability to scale it. So just in the last three, four years, we now have the ability to do it at scale for millions of people.

Tina I was just going to say the power of your work is in the relationship connection that you're making with the learners that you are engaged with, so that you're modeling the behavior with them as you're also supporting them. We can assess all day, and ACT is in the assessment business. So of course we can give you five or six things to consider. But at the end of the day, that relationship connection that we make with the learners in whatever training program, in whatever higher education institution, in whatever employment environment we're in, it is the one on one connection, the group connection, where we're modeling the behavior that leads to success. And it takes that human connection that makes the difference, in addition to the training and skills that we're bringing together the table. So I applaud the work that you're doing.

Tina Gridiron, act, Keenan Harrison, ets. Thank you so much for being our future.

Sam.