WorkforceRx

The combination of a unique economic moment and major new funding out of Washington is creating an opportunity to rethink workforce development policies and programs. But will the tough questions be asked that will lead to a significant reshaping of the nation’s approach? Maria Flynn, president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, is hopeful, but is not yet seeing the “blue sky redesign” discussion she...

It’s estimated there are one million unique credentials in the United States when you count all of the degrees, certificates, licenses, badges, and apprenticeships offered. But how are employers, educators and learners supposed to determine their validity and whether they might actually help someone advance economically?  “It’s our job to make sure information about credentials is accessible in a...

If you’re wondering why there are ten million unfilled jobs in the U.S. despite having an unemployment rate above pre-pandemic levels, Ryan Craig has part of the answer: traditional higher education is too expensive and can’t keep up with changes in the labor market leaving millions of Americans in need of other ways to obtain the skills that will lead to good jobs. Craig, a prominent investor and...

If you want proof of how the pandemic has taken a toll on the healthcare workforce, look no further than a recent national poll showing that nearly 30% of nurses, doctors, and allied professionals might leave their profession within the next year. Daniel Bustillo, whose work as executive director of the Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP) gives him a national perspective, thinks that num...

The nation’s governors have their hands full navigating an uneven economic recovery and turbulent labor market.  Fortunately, they can draw on the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices to help guide their decision making. “Governors are focused on getting people safely back to work and filling jobs that are open right now and looking for ways to get people quickly skilled up for...

As more and more people acquire skills and credentials outside of structured degree programs, employers are looking for credible ways to assess what potential employees have learned.  One increasingly popular and agile approach to meeting this need is digital badging, and in this episode of WorkforceRx you can learn all about it from one of the pioneers in the space, Wayne Skipper, the founder and...

“We’ve got 200 million Americans who are not benefiting from what we think of as the most important engine of growth in our economy – innovation,” says Chad Evans, executive vice president and secretary to the board at the Council on Competitiveness.  That reality helped spark creation of the Council’s National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers which has already developed 50 r...

Presiding over an online platform with 82 million learners and hundreds of millions of course enrollments gives Jeff Maggioncalda a unique view of what’s happening around the world in higher education and training. What he’s seeing is growth and opportunity. The Coursera CEO says the number of people accessing its catalog of thousands of courses and certificate programs from top universities and c...

Finding qualified workers has become a chronic and deeply concerning struggle for U.S. employers, but as our guest on this episode of WorkforceRx sees it, this is a self-inflicted problem. Byron Auguste, a PhD economist and former White House economic policy official, says the skilled workers are there but are routinely screened out of the applicant pool by hiring processes that only consider thos...

“I think we have a moment in this new decade we are in to start fresh when it comes to how we build our economies and build our communities and build our society,” says Shalin Jyotishi, senior policy analyst at New America. An important part of this fresh start is to further connect workforce development with the nation’s R&D and doing so beyond the nation’s tech corridors. Jyotishi says unive...

As signs of economic recovery in the U.S. continue to build, some experts are predicting a “jobless recovery,” while others are more optimistic about job growth. Will hard hit sectors bounce back? What changes do we need in job training and education to spur a post-pandemic economy? For answers to these and related questions, Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan turns to Stuart Andreason on this ep...

Dr. Sunita Mutha thinks if health care providers consistently asked themselves one question, it would lead to reducing health disparities based on race, income and other factors: “Who does this advantage, and who does this disadvantage?” In her extensive research at the intersection of health disparities and quality improvement, she’s come to understand there are predictable things providers do th...

What if there was something business owners could do to boost employee retention 65%, increase worker loyalty and perfectly align company and employee goals? Oh, and by the way, give people a sense of hope and increase their wealth at the same time? Well, according to Howard Brodsky, that “something” is using a shared ownership model. Brodsky, a globally recognized pioneer in cooperatives, co-foun...

“We know from history that technology both creates and destroys jobs, and we don’t know what will happen this time around,” says Jamie Merisotis, author of the new book Human Work in the Age of Machines , “but I do think we should be more interested in the work that humans can do, because that is clearly something we can control by better preparing people for that human work.” That preparation nee...

For someone interested in the interplay of technology and healthcare, the timing has always been right for Dr. Ashwini Davison. Implementation of Electronic Health Records was just starting to take off when she was an internal medicine resident at Johns Hopkins a little over a decade ago. As the adoption of EHRs and digital health applications rose, so did the potential for big data as a tool to a...

“We want to empower every citizen to be able to make a decision about how they want to invest in themselves and the kind of career they want,” says Dr. Soon Joo Gog, Chief Futurist at SkillsFuture SG in Singapore’s Ministry of Education.  That’s obviously an ambitious goal, but this small city-state has a reputation for pioneering new approaches to building a skills ecosystem. To achieve it, the g...

Spurred by heightened activism in 2020 against persistent racism in the U.S., many business leaders are engaged in a reckoning of their own policies, behaviors and corporate culture to determine how those might be contributing to systemic inequity and exclusion. Marsha Sampson Johnson, a leading diversity advocate and veteran corporate leader, has advice for those undertaking this work.  “Diversit...

As a longtime observer of the Washington political scene and a “go-to” expert on workforce and education policy issues, Andy Van Kleunen thinks that despite the country’s deep political divisions, it’s possible to make generation-defining investments in education and training to spur major employment growth. “There’s not a lot of partisan divide on investing in the retraining of somebody who’s bee...

Workers are showing the strains of social isolation, disrupted work and family routines, and sustained anxiety for personal safety — all induced by the pandemic.  Fortunately, employers are taking note according to Eva Sage-Gavin, a former Fortune 500 executive who now advises C-suite leaders on talent strategy for Accenture. Sage-Gavin says employers are realizing they need to take a “whole human...

When he first started trying to score clinical research data in the mid-1980’s, Stanford University neuroscientist Walter Greenleaf was using a ruler, pen and paper.  Now, thanks in part to his pioneering efforts, similar research can be conducted using virtual reality and augmented reality devices.  These technologies are also being integrated throughout medicine, including treatment for various...

Bryan Hancock has spent the last two decades focused on the disconnect between the skilled workers employers need and what is available in the workforce. As Global Leader of McKinsey & Company’s Talent Management Practice, he’s able to tap into the firm’s deep research on workforce trends to advise private and public sector clients and what he’s seeing is an even larger skills gap developing a...

You can’t have an effective response to public health challenges without putting racial and social equity at the center of your approach, and one key way to do that is supplementing the healthcare workforce with “trusted voices” from underserved communities. That’s the view of Dr. Rishi Manchanda, a public health veteran and healthcare leader whose career has focused on developing new strategies t...

If you want to know how employers are changing their thinking about educating workers in the wake of COVID, Jaime Fall is in a great position to tell you. As director of the Aspen Institute’s workforce development initiative Upskill America, Jaime is constantly in touch with some of the 5,000 businesses in the program’s network and he has plenty of news to share with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quin...

A Q&A with Futuro Health’s CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan on the origins of the organization’s groundbreaking model for growing the healthcare workforce, and the innovative ways Futuro is building onramps to education for adult learners.

Van Ton-Quinlivan reveals that her deep appreciation for educational opportunity is rooted in experiences making a new life in the U.S. after her family fled the Vietnam War. Helping others access the same transformational opportunities is her life’s work, and led to her guiding a billion-dollar workforce development program in the largest higher education system in the country, and becoming the f...