Work In Progress

In this episode of Work in Progress, Marlene Orozco, associate director of the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI), discusses the think tank's just-released report, The State of Latino Entrepreneurship: 2022. Latinos now make up 19% of the total U.S. population, having grown 23% over the past decade to more than 62 million people, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. Latinos also cont...

In this episode of Work in Progress, Robert Blaine, senior executive and director for the Institute for Youth, Education, and Families with the National League of Cities (NLC). The National League of Cities represents more than 19,000 cities, towns, and villages across the country. They work with mayors, city managers, and other local leaders to find solutions to pressing community issues. Blaine...

In this episode, Dr. Jean Accius, SVP Thought Leadership and International Affairs for AARP, joins me to discuss the midcareer workforce and the Great Resignation. I recently read a startling statistic: there are 3.3 million more retirees in the U.S. as of October than in January 2020, just before the start of the pandemic. That’s a 7% increase. Call it what you will—the Great Retirement, the Grea...

In this episode of Work in Progress, I'm joined by Vivek Sharma, CEO and co-founder of the workforce education company InStride and author of the new book C-Spark: CEO-led Workforce Education for the AGE of AND. In the book, Sharma warns that "the American workforce is in Crisis with a capital C" and challenges the nation's CEOs to do something about it. He calls a company's employees the most imp...

In this episode, Nicole Elam, president & CEO of National Bankers Association (NBA), joins me to discuss the important role minority owned-and-operated banks play in a community's economic health and in closing the wealth gap. The U.S. banking system carries about $21 trillion in assets and minority owned banks make up just 3% of that total. The NBA was established in 1927 to support these banks w...

In this episode of Work in Progress, recorded at the Milken Institute Global Conference, I sit down with Aaron Seybert, Managing Director of the Social Investment Practice at the Kresge Foundation. Kresge's overall mission is to boost the economic mobility of low-income Americans and has seven program teams dedicated to improving "the quality of life in America’s cities by addressing barriers to c...

In this episode of Work in Progress, Rachel Carlson, CEO and co-founder of Guild Education, discusses how the company is working with employers to upskill and reskill America's workforce, to the benefit of both the employers and employees. "We're focused on unlocking economic opportunity for America's workforce, especially the frontline," says Carlson. To do so, Guild Education creates partnership...

Trying to figure out how to break into the tech industry can be daunting. Traditional four-year institutions can be expensive places to learn computer science and lack of exposure to the skills needed in the industry as a whole can derail a career before it gets started. In this Expanding Opportunities in Tech podcast series produced in partnership with Cognizant Foundation, we examine alternative...

Trying to figure out how to break into the tech industry can be daunting. Traditional four-year institutions can be expensive places to learn computer science and lack of exposure to the skills needed in the industry as a whole can derail a career before it gets started. In this Expanding Opportunities in Tech podcast series produced in partnership with Cognizant Foundation, we examine alternative...

Trying to figure out how to break into the tech industry can be daunting. Traditional four-year institutions can be expensive places to learn computer science and lack of exposure to the skills needed in the industry as a whole can derail a career before it gets started. In this Expanding Opportunities in Tech Work in Progress podcast series produced in partnership with Cognizant Foundation, we ex...

Trying to figure out how to break into the tech industry can be daunting. Traditional four-year institutions can be expensive places to learn computer science and lack of exposure to the skills needed in the industry as a whole can derail a career before it gets started. In this Expanding Opportunities in Tech Work in Progress podcast series produced in partnership with Cognizant Foundation, we ex...

My guest on this episode of Work in Progress is Ryan Stowers, the executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF), a philanthropy whose mission is to remove barriers that prevent people from reaching their potential. One of their key focus areas is education and their role in preparing us for the workforce. Stowers cites cost and inflexibility as two of the biggest barriers standing in the...

In this episode of Work in Progress, my guest is Rachel Korberg, executive director and co-founder of the Families and Workers Fund (FWF), a coalition of now more than 20 philanthropic groups working together to build an equitable economic recovery and create jobs that enable upward mobility. The Families and Workers Fund was started last year in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with the go...

In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan and I discuss the importance of collaboration in solving employers' problem in finding enough workers while insuring workers find good-paying jobs and careers. Take health care workers, for instance. The country was already in need of more trained health care workers—including medical technicians, medical billing...

It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month. In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Mark Ouellette, program manager for the Cybersecurity Youth Apprenticeship Initiative (CYAI), joins me to talk about a unique learn-and-earn program that is exposing youth adults to opportunities and careers in the cybersecurity workforce. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, there was a shortage of cybersecurity...

It's national Manufacturing Week and Friday is national Manufacturing Day. Manufacturing continues to be one of the top five employers in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But, like all industries, the skills that employers want are changing. In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, I'm joined by Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, for a look at the...

In this episode of Work in Progress, Joe Fuller, Harvard Business School (HBS) professor and co-chair of the school’s Managing the Future of Work project joins me in a discussion about the widening labor shortage and some ideas about how business leaders can improve their hiring practices to uncover untapped talent pools. That's the focus of a new report from HBS and Accenture, Hidden Workers. "Co...

In this episode of Work in Progress, I'm joined by Daniel Ferguson, the director of workforce development at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), a nonprofit organization that incubates promising cleantech startups in underserved communities and then helps to develop the local L.A. green jobs workforce through training and internships. "There are two working definitions for green jobs. One...

In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management—better known as SHRM—sits down with me at the ASU+GSV Summit 2021 to discuss upheaval in the workforce, the questions hiring managers and employers want answered now, and the issue that makes him want to climb onto his soap box. An Unprecedented Period of Adjustmen...

In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Diana Caba, assistant vice president for policy and community engagement for the Hispanic Federation joins me to discuss the digital skills gap in the Latino community and what is being done to close that gap. "The dire need for digital skills is a longstanding issue for communities of color in general. And before the pandemic, the digital divide ha...

In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, I am joined by Kelcey Reed, the new chief technology officer for the nonprofit Opportunity@Work. Opportunity@Work's mission is to rewire the U.S. labor market so that individuals Skilled Through Alternative Routes—workers and job seekers they call STARs—can work, learn, and earn to their full potential. "You shouldn't have to have a college degree t...