Julian Assid Transcript

8/9/2019 Julian Assid Transcript

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Julian Assid Transcript

[Julian Assid] : I mean first of all we know that the fastest growing jobs, they pretty much all require sometimes secondary eventually.

According to the Gates Foundation, 22 of the 30 fastest growing jobs, Ibelieve it is, require some post secondary. But that doesnt just meandegrees. A census from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says jobs nowthat require an Associates degree or secondary certification aregrowing 50% faster than the job market as a whole. I mean, I could goon. The top Georgetown university jobs that are generated by the Act,at least 54% require at least a post secondary certificate. So youreabsolutely right. I mean its not just about people getting Bachelorsdegrees, it really is about getting them credentials that employersrecognize and that lead to employment and careers and career track

jobs. It used to be I mean, here we are sitting in Rhode Island itused to be anyone in Rhode Island and elsewhere could go to highschool, get a job at the plant and theyd be set for life. Those days aregone. Entry into the middle class is now post secondary. In terms of the types of jobs that were talking about youre absolutely right.

Theres no question that obviously there are plenty of jobs at thehighest end, where its really the need and weve heard all about theneed for PhDs. Theres also been a growing class of jobs that reallyinvolve some resuscitation of the economy. Many of them aretechnician-type jobs. So your auto-repair person now becomes acomputer tech, basically. And so does the person who fixes yourrefrigerator or your AC, your air conditioning system. Theres all sortsof jobs in new manufacturing and so on.

Julian Assid] : Just under those. And what were seeing is that the barhas really been raised. President Obama is now calling for everyone tohave a very we argue that it cant just be any old career; its reallygot to be tied to something thats happening in the economy thatsgoing to lead to a decent job. The skills folks - companies have sort of been saying for years, for the most part they are looking for peoplewho can read, write, think critically and do math at a very proficientlevel 9th or 10th grade math at a minimum and who know how tolearn, who have certain entrepreneurial bend to them. Thats clearlythe baseline, that we need people that are much more literate, able tocompute and entrepreneurial.

Chris Finlay] : Both sides. How do you I would imagine that there areincentives given to certain types of programs. Maybe more grants soyou can get more people to study certain types of things. From theschool side than from the employer side; theyre really pointing to the

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need, right? That gets pretty interesting. So theyre saying, We needthese sorts of things in our company. I mean, how do you help them?Are they really good at articulating that or are you helping them toshape their vision of what they need?

[Julian Assid] : Well, it really varies. Employers by and large theyrenot so great at it. There are definitely sectors where they are muchbetter at it: health care, for example. An industry like health care ishighly regulated and the jobs are fairly well defined and tend to betheres all sorts of classifications established in testing and so its afairly straightforward path. What we typically will do is, when we cometo a state or a region, we first take a look at what the broad data tellsus and so well want to understand what are the this really has to bedifferent than pie data. So what are the trends? Where is it growing? Isit a climbing industry? Is it an associated occupation? The idea is tothen zero in on what are the that would sort of be a jumping off pointfor developing and implementing a sound educational trainingprogram. So for example, were working now for a city in El Paso todevelop a regional workforce strategic plan and the first step in thatprocess has been working with the gap analysis. Were identifying theeconomic opportunities in the upper Rio Grande region. But like I saidthen, that alone is enough. Too many force development initiatives arereally designed based on these very broad market projections alone.And so we eventually then need to dig deeper and work withemployers both to understand where theyre coming from but also to,in many cases, help them understand what the opportunities might be.So for example, weve done work relatively early onI mean now,seven to eight years ago when Biotech was really beginning boomingin the Silicon Valley in California, there were firms that were having avery difficult time holding onto their entry-level technicians. People inwhite suits who were, by and large, putting together the medicine orwhatever it is the company is making. So they are essentially hi-techmanufacturing jobs and as a default companies were hiring graduatesout of the Bachelors of Science programs and finding that theycouldnt keep them on the job. And so through some discussion withthe employers really kind of analyzing and helping them break downand understand the job requirements, we were able to work with localcommunity colleges to take biology programs that previously theyhadnt considered. And through putting together like-minded scientistsin the company to work with faculty at the community college todesign curriculums has now led to a pretty consistent AssociatesDegree students moving into the job.

[Julian Assid] : Well the biologyA lot of what makes the education



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more relevant and successful is when its not taught simply in theabstract, not just learning biology for the sake of learning biology. Itslearning biology and having in the curriculum examples drawn fromreal life, from actual business. In this case, from Biotech. Its one thing

to understand how experimentation is done in the classroom andanother thing to begin to understand how its done on an actualworkbench in a workplace. Theres really no margin for error. And alsohow its applied. And we see the same in so many other instances.Weve worked with an organization, a group in Agro is trainingIt hasessentially become the go-to provider for training bilingual health careworkers. What they do is they are teaching folks who are new to thecountry these are Hispanic-speaking workers and theyre teachingthem English. Not just for the sake of learning English, but in thecontext of a health care career. So the idea is when they come out of these programs they may not know the language as broadly but theyknow it deeply enough and well enough that they can actually go andget a decent job.

[Chris Finlay] : Thats really interesting.

[Julian Assid] : For those who are at a dead end, it presents a greatopportunity. And when you look at our systems for health basiceducation in this country and our various elemental layout and sort of remedial programs, our track record is abysmal. We believe that partof that is because there is just no real connection to their lives in muchof what theyre learning. Thats not to say that we dont want to upholdacademic standards and have this country earn some solid workers. Ithink that the model is largely outmoded and has to be made relevantto the fast-changing economy.

[Chris Finlay] : Yeah, that seems to make a lot of sense. Aninteresting fact that we heard from a Yale admissions officer: He talkedabout all the students who came from disadvantaged backgrounds allwanted to be doctors. Whats interesting to me is that is such a directapplication of skill, right? So Im going to learn to go do this thing andIve had a model of that in my life. So it seems like there might besome similar strengths to showing students what their career path is.As you say, it seems as though we teach students, even at theAssociates level quite often, in a similar way that we would considerteaching someone that goes to a higher level, like an elite institution.

[Julian Assid] : Exactly.

[Chris Finlay] : Which, yeah, doesnt seem to make any sense at all.



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[Julian Assid] : Right, right. Well, the same can be said about the eliteinstitutions. During in the height of the dot com boom in New York City,I was very active with education, focused on careers. And I wasorganizing a panel for the New York Software Industry Association. We

brought in the deans of the various computer science programs,engineering programs in the region. These were all the elites; I meanthis was, you know, NYU, Stony Brook, all the top schools in the area.We brought them into the Great Hall and had the room filled witharound 300 IT execs. It was incredible. I think we needed more securitybecause some people were saying, You guys are just not getting whatwe need. I mean were getting people who are book smart and theyreclearly and actually capable, but theyre just not being prepared forthe transition to work. Theyre not able to apply themselves. Werehaving to teach so many basic skills from scratch. These are, again,sort of the basic skills that I mentioned earlier around in not onlyhaving the math and the reading, but also being able to work in teams,to be able to communicate and have kind of this entrepreneurial sense.

[Chris Finlay] : Its interesting, the sort of perspective of looking ateducation based on sector. You know, its part of some programs thatare like the Microsoft U, that sort of thing. Its very company-specificwhich seems like sort of a gamble from the satisfaction, but reallylooking at it as a general sector opportunity has a slightly differentbend to it rather than just an open-technology background orsomething like that.

[Julian Assid] : Well thats true, but I sort of think that for manypeople, it doesnt necessarily have to be about trapping people intocareers. For many who are from less advanced backgrounds, youhavent been exposed to those professional careers. Even if they have,its getting experience that kind of gives you a sense of whatever it isyou like or you dont like. I think thats why its just so critical to makesure that everyone gets some of this and that everyone gets to testhow they would apply themselves but always with the idea that wereall, for the foreseeable future, going to keep reinventing ourselves. Imean, no one is very few people have a particular linear career. Evenif someone comes to Chicago who is new to this country, goes intoInstituto del Progresso Latinos Health Care, Isle and Health Trainingand they get a job there in a hospital, that person still has to continuethinking about: How do I upgrade my skills? Do I like this job? If Idont like this job, can I apply myself to a different field? And so on. Ithink its just a very different mindset. Its not like education as a finitepursuit. It cant be that you go and get educated and youre on withyour life. Now think if you look at how most of our careers haveworked. It kind of follows more of what Ive described. You get some



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internship and its great or its horrible.

[Julian Assid] : You like design, you hate design. Whatever it is, butits there. The opportunity is there. I think that NOW is making the very

explicit connection between that and what youre learning in theclassroom.

[Chris Finlay] : Could you maybe give us some examples of programswhere its really effective, where its performed really well for studentsto see the value of the things theyre learning?

[Julian Assid] : Let me think of places that are doing this. I think wereparticularly interested in the lower wage, lower skilled folks, which iswhy we focus a lot of our operations on community colleges. been aleader in this work and if you were to look at the IMS program andtheres a whole bunch thats very well documented out there.Washington has done some really good stuff. If you take a look at ourwebsite, on a couple of reports are highlighted a number of theseplaces. One is Halfways How-To Guide like in Ohio, Kentucky andOregon in addition to Washington.


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Julian Assid Transcript