- 12 Jul 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
How SkillUp signposts pathways to good jobs
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Steve Lee, CEO of SkillUp Coalition, a workforce nonprofit and affiliated network of training providers, employers, and other groups fostering upward mobility. We’ll talk about SkillUp’s evolving mission, from its founding early in the Covid-19 pandemic to the present. How does the group prepare workers who don’t have college degrees for career-sustaining jobs? We’ll also talk about which fields and jobs offer the most opportunity and how to tailor training to fit the needs of workers looking to improve their prospects. And we’ll consider the advantages and challenges of working at scale to aggregate and coordinate services nationwide while addressing regional conditions. Steve, welcome to the podcast.
Steve Lee: Bill, it’s a real honor.
Kerr: Why don’t you begin with a little bit about your background and, specifically, what led you to SkillUp Coalition in the summer of 2020?
Lee: I’ve been sort of working for 20-odd years or so, both in the for-profit and nonprofit space. The reality is intergenerational poverty, right, and the fact that, even now, nearly half of those who are 30 are worse off than when their parents were 30. An eye-opener for me, I used to work in philanthropy, and I remember one of our grantees said, “Steve, I love the work philanthropy does, but what it really does, it helps people live better in poverty.” And so I’ve been thinking, “How do you sustainably and measurably lift families out of poverty?” And I feel like there are only really two ways to do this. One is education, and second is work. What we can do is to connect to marginalized job seekers without a college degree into opportunities that we think are in demand, what we call “high-opportunity employment.” And so that’s what drove us to start SkillUp.
Kerr: That mission is very noble and one that will resonate with many of our listeners. Maybe give us a little overview of the SkillUp organization and also the network coalition that surrounds it.
Lee: Yeah, absolutely. We’re a B2C nonprofit tech platform whose mission is to help those without a college degree earning under $40,000 to find what we call “high-opportunity employment.” So think of us as a worker-driven intermediary. We only work with training programs, for example, that meet the many needs of workers, which are really driven by things like time, cost, and how much am I going to earn. We only work with employers who post jobs that offer high-opportunity employment, how we define it, minimum living wage based on the MIT living wage calculator, no degree required, benefits, and upskilling opportunities. We’re at that early stage of the journey. And a lot of things that we do not do—particularly we don’t work on the last-mile solution, particularly work with employers. And there’s a whole universe of folks who work in that space, partners of ours, groups like OneTen or Opportunity@Work or Guild.
Kerr: That’s great. Maybe you can unpack a little bit more about that worker journey. And what’s the perspective that job seeker’s brought into, and how does that evolve as they’re working with your organization?
Lee: We primarily use digital marketing techniques. We try to market in the language and the voice that they care about: Be very simple, very direct, be aspirational, to surface what’s happening in a larger ecosystem. And then what we try to do is, we try to translate what’s going on into a product experience that will resonate with low-income workers at scale. We only surface what we think are 35 career pathways, because we think based on the research and the knowledge and all the great work others have done, these are the 35 best. And then we try to translate that into an experience that’s going to meet the needs of marginalized workers across the country. And that’s actually really hard to do. It’s really hard being a B2C. We fail, we test, we learn, and we repeat and rinse. And that’s sort of our whole model.
Kerr: Let’s stay on that last. Both job and career were mentioned. Over the course of the three years that SkillUp has been doing its work, you’ve shifted more from the job to the career. So explain why that shift came about.
Lee: The founder was a guy named Josh Jarrett. And so, with gum and shoe leather, he basically launched SkillUp back in the summer of 2020 to meet the immediate needs of that time to help a worker find a job—let’s get someone a job who has been displaced. So fast-forward 12 to 15 months. The labor market had changed significantly. Unemployment was 5 percent, not 15 percent. And so what workers are thinking about is, “I can get a job, but what about my career? How can you help me support my career journey?” We got that by speaking to workers. And so now we message and serve based on career. “But you know what, it’s darn hard getting this job. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes money,” et cetera. “So how can you, SkillUp, support us in this ongoing journey that could take months if not years?” And so we are sort of building an experience and offer you support services along the way, whether they are things like childcare or coaching or social capital. And so we have to adjust along, because we are direct to worker. And so, unless we’re meeting the needs of the workers in that moment in time, then we’re going to fail.
Kerr: Yeah. You’re direct to worker is a brilliant description of how you’ve embraced and been working with the job and career seeker. Let’s turn to the other half of the coalition that you work with. What are the key things from their perspective? Are they more stable than this rapidly evolving worker set of needs?
Lee: I think what they’re trying to do is, they’re trying to surface through employers middle-class jobs—good jobs that pay well, that have benefits—high-quality jobs that are going to be around for many generations. And the tricky part, then, is what they don’t have is, they don’t have a front end, they don’t have access. What we don’t have is access to employers in a deep way. And so how do we integrate, using technology, to create an end-to-end journey, and how do we track data along the way to see what works and doesn’t work? And then how do we work backwards to figure out the real success stories and then share that out with the ecosystem?
Kerr: Let’s go back and think more about the key priority areas that you’ve laid out. Tell us a bit more about how you select those, and how stable they are from year to year, and what are some of the traits of them.
Lee: We adopted a lot of the research that’s already been done out the ecosystem. And so we meshed the 35 careers that everyone says are in demand—IT, healthcare, et cetera. But then we try to match it to the needs of the worker. So if you want to be a software engineer, that’s great—and maybe that’s in demand—but that’s not one of our 35, because the reality is, it takes long, it takes money. The vast majority require a college degree. And so we wouldn’t surface that, even though it’s a great job. And so our 35 has a resonance of how it impacts the worker. They care about time, money, and earnings. And it’s that rubric for which we put a scorecard behind it, and not everything fits.
Kerr: Great. Tell us a bit about the time aspect of that trilogy.
Lee: Yeah, so let’s say you want to be a nurse, and let’s say you don’t have any background in healthcare. You start off as a medical assistant. That’s one of our 35 career pathways—good job, pays a living wage, et cetera. But it’s not the destination that we want you to be, that you and society wants. We want you to be a nurse. Well, to be a nurse requires a four-year degree, $30,000. And families that we serve—who are 35 percent single moms, mostly not earning a whole lot—where do they have the time, money, energy to go through that process? And so we don’t put “nurse,” but what we do do is, we put “assistant,” but we mention the art of the possible—IT support software engineer, medical assistant nurse. So hopefully we open up the eyes of the art of the possible by putting on our website, “Hey, you could be X, but you start at Y. And let us help you get to Y or to X.” That’s the journey that we want to take.
Kerr: You mentioned earlier the massive amount of change that we’re all experiencing, and I think we all look at the labor market, and we have both on one side, lots of unfilled jobs, labor scarcity. And yet we also worry a lot about advancing automation and its potential future impact. How do those play into the work you do and the selection process that you’re having for these types of roles and future careers?
Lee: Yeah, it’s such an important question. Obviously, a whole bunch of buzz around this. But I’ll be very honest with you, we’re direct to consumer. How does all this talk around the great reshuffling and generative [AI], how does this translate to worker learners who, all they care about is, “I want something better for me and my family than what I have now.” We’re not an academic institution, we’re not researchers, we’re directly B2C. We try to listen to all the things that people are talking about in the current economy and translate that into a direct-to-consumer product that’s going to meet the needs of the workers. [What are] the right opportunities going forward? How do we meet them with the support service as they take that long journey? How do we help workers after they get the job? That is how we try to use what’s out in the ecosystem to translate into the voice of the worker.
Kerr: That opening experience and bringing the potential workers in is so important. You have a phrase at SkillUp, “community of support.” I’d love for you to define that a little bit more for us and also how that links to your equity agenda.
Lee: So I think what’s really important about SkillUp is this idea of participant voice. And so how we think about that really is four main ways. One is, how do we best market and build and design that actually meets the needs of workers, the workers we care about across America? And just to give a tactical example around that, we actually have, as part of our processes, a product advisory board that’s made up of SkillUp workers that we pay. And that gives us all the good and bad and ugly around what’s happening on how we market to them and how we serve them on our product experience. And what I love about them, they’re not shy about expressing all the things that we’re doing wrong, and that’s brilliant. And we do that because we want to hear that participant voice, that worker, that the voice of the worker. We have a survey panel of several thousand SkillUp users that we survey on a quarterly basis, and we ask them a bunch of questions. And we learn through that supportive community of SkillUp users at several thousand strong, again, how we’re offering things that are good, maybe not so good, and they give us great feedback. And then all this impacts how we partner with our coalition partners, as I noted above, because the community support goes across workers, but also community includes our peers, the organizations we partner with, et cetera, and how do we work tightly with them again to take a worker across that finish line again, which can be long and arduous. And so I think this idea of community is at the heart of what we do, and we are trying to support this.
Kerr: Steve, it strikes how I think listeners, how much you have invested in the interface between your organization and the workers that are being brought to the platform and their job search. And I guess a question would be, there’s a lot of heterogeneity among people that would be seeking jobs. And is there a right profile? Is there a profile that’s inappropriate for SkillUp? Talk about the selection of whom on the worker side you can engage with or get the most results for?
Lee: So our target audience are those earning $40 [thousand] without a college degree. That’s our core target audience. And so roughly 80 percent of our user, basically, fits that category. We don’t want to help folks who could help themselves anyway, even without SkillUp. And so we try to find folks who we think—and these are non-college [degree] holders¬¬—that, but for SkillUp, may not be able to succeed.
Kerr: You mentioned earlier the very regular survey you do of your users, which is important for driving everything from how you’re framing the service to its product features and so forth. Tell us a little bit more about that data collection process. And then also, are there any notable trends or recent kind of findings of stuff that’s happening out in the labor force that you can share with us?
Lee: SkillUp has what we call a “pulse survey” of roughly 2,000 SkillUp users that we survey on a quarterly basis. And the goal is still over five years. So it’s to have this longitudinal data set over five years of the same workers to see what their journey looks like, what their success points are, and where do they wind up in life. And we work with MDRC, who’s a fairly well-known research organization, to build a question set in the model concept. We’ve done this for a couple years now, and we’ve learned stuff I think that has some statistical significance, because the sample size is actually pretty large. And I think the end goal of all this is that we can start doing some subgroup analysis. So if you think about demographics or regions, we can do some of that stuff at some level of significance. And then, what we hope to do is match that qual[itative] data with quant[itative] data. So we have a whole bunch of Google Analytics data, and if you think about this, a digital world, every time someone clicks, we get data. And so if we think about how to match the qual[itative] data of these 2,000 and here’s how they’re doing in life, how do we match that with the quant[itative] data, and how do we tell a story behind what the quant[itative] data is telling us matched to the qualitative data that workers are telling us to really create a learning agenda, if you will, that says to the world, “This is what workers are really experiencing, and here’s what works and doesn’t work,” and then share that back with the rest of the world. So that’s for, I think we think that’s unique in the marketplace, et cetera. And so what are we learning about some of this stuff? We’ve learned that right now 70 percent of our users are women, half of them are single moms. We’ve learned, again, not surprisingly when we talk on the survey, that childcare is really important. Again, not surprisingly. We’ve learned that this idea of the rhetoric of open jobs for unfilled jobs for the population we care about, it’s kind of just rhetoric. They’ve struggled through the process for getting the jobs that the ecosystem says are right for them. And so, hence, this idea of support services. And then the last thing I’ll share with you, we have a program called “Earn and Learn” at SkillUp, where we connect workers into partner employers that have these gateway jobs that are really, really good, but most importantly, they have upskilling opportunities. Now, not everyone takes advantage of this process, Earn and Learn, through our website. But what we learned is that it opens up their eyes to other opportunities. So even if they don’t take advantage of Earn and Learn, 70 percent of our users have said it has helped them take some other positive action toward finding a better job. Nearly half have said they applied to a training program because they realized they don’t have the right skill sets yet to be able to get you to consider them for that Earn and Learn job. So again, it’s like this sort of tertiary effect, but these tertiary effects can be really, really important. So those are a few things that, at least for me, have been really eye opening.
Kerr: That’s great. And Steve, I think if I had a listener that somehow could not hear the specifics of what you’re doing but could only hear the business practices that are involved, from performance digital marketing over to the integration end-to-end tech flows, a lot of it would sound very familiar. And I want to use that as a parlay into, from the beginning, SkillUp has focused deeply on scalable solutions. And so I’d like you to share with us a little bit about very targeted—maybe immediate versus the scalable solution—approach, and how have you balanced that? What’s been sort of the drive toward it?
Lee: Yeah, this is one of the biggest tension points of where we are at SkillUp. So SkillUp is almost three years old. So we’re no longer a start-up, but we’re not quite growth yet. We’re kind of stuck in the middle. And it’s a really interesting place to be, because it creates tension points all over the place based on how we want to focus, on the one hand, and yet we want to have impact and scale innovation on the other hand. And how you marry those two is actually really, really, really hard. I think, to some degree, we’ve scaled a little bit. It’s when funders or investors are asking us to leverage that next big opportunity for SkillUp to test, pilot—whatever you want to call it—scalable ideas. And we’ll put dollars behind those bespoke efforts. But doing so creates tension. One, it may take us off our core mission—the mission that we want to achieve based on our current pipeline—and it may cannibalize our existing core efforts. And so how do you balance the need to do both at the same time? And I think that’s a real challenge specific to where we are as an organization. And that’s how at least I, as leader of operations, think about, how do you maintain the focus that we have to do to accomplish our current mission, while at the same time trying to do something in parallel to think about how you really scale. We’ve served, to date, 1.5 million workers. That’s a lot, but it’s not really a lot. Our goal is to be three, four, or five x in a couple years. How do you do that? And yet how do you still maintain the integrity, right, of the work you do now with fidelity and data and all that kind of stuff? It’s really hard. And it’s also hard because we’re both national and regional. So we have a national platform, which is fantastic, and we get funding to do that, but we also have regional platforms—12 now across the country, where we have bespoke efforts and bespoke investors et cetera. And so we have to balance the needs of putting dollars into the regional and national that creates scale, but also fidelity to our current environment. It’s a real challenge, but it’s an interesting place to be. I think we’ll break through it.
Kerr: Yeah, that’s important, and maybe continue on that. Let’s speak a little bit about the leadership skill set that’s part of SkillUp. Both maybe describe where it is, where it’s trying to go to. How have you worked in the staffing on the leadership side?
Lee: I think you have to hire the right people around you. I think that’s really important. And I think it’s particularly important for early-stage organizations—or even where we are now, between early stage and growth—where I think everyone’s input is so valuable as a small team. We’re 16 staff. And I think the other thing around people is this idea of diversity of thought. And I think that’s how you evolve into the best decisions. And the second thing is, what’s the next sort of scalable thing? Learning credentials and digital wallets and company-based learning and skills cred[entials], all that kind of stuff. And yet, at the same time, we have a rubric and scorecard. And so when you have the tension points, we try to put some math behind it and come up with some level of this decision making around that.
Kerr: I’d like to take us through two big topic areas and have you weigh in on them. One that will have been featured on a number of our recent podcasts is skills-based hiring, and organizations seeking to take skills inventories, and reducing credential requirements, and so on and so forth. And just tell us a little bit about how you are prepping workers and employers for the skills-based hiring.
Lee: For employers, I think rightfully so, what they care about is, can you bring the right person to my organization? Can you—SkillUp or SkillUp partner—send to us where, without us doing a lot of work, the best and most-qualified candidates that are going to meet the jobs that we have? That’s what they want. And that’s our obligation as an ecosystem to be able to do that. They also need to see the possibilities of what workers that we care about can offer. What I think is missing—and maybe I’m wrong about this, Bill—in this space for employers are proof points of success at scale. So for employers, you have to de-risk everything. The things that we all know around inertia and incentive structures make it really hard for HR folks to hire nontraditional talent. And then for workers, what we are saying to them is that, one, we’re here to help. But we’re also honest with them, that if you want to get to a career, we’re only the first part of that journey. There will be a need for continuous improvement that you’re going to have to do. There’s going to [be a] need for additional credentials for you to be where you want to go. And that they’ll need to develop those skill sets, and they’ll need to be patient.
Kerr: Steve, if everybody’s talking about skills-based hiring, they are doubly triply talking about remote work. How does remote work factor into what SkillUp is doing and what it anticipates matching workers and opportunities toward the future?
Lee: The people who need remote work are the ones that we’re trying to help, those who are single parents, those who live in rural communities, people moving out of urban to rural and ex-urban. There’s obviously this movement around remote. The difficulty with remote for skills population is that the vast majority of remote jobs are for those who traditionally are college-degree holders. And so what we have to think about is, how do we take what’s out there and put it into an experience that can actually meet the needs of a SkillUp user. And so, if you think about non-degree holder, short time, low money, decent earnings, when you do that, the universe of remote jobs gets smaller, but we want to surface up the ones that, specifically, a SkillUp worker can actually get—these tens of thousands, hopefully more. And then we’re going to build something. We’re going to build a site, we are in partnership with Truist Foundation to build something, what we call a “catalog online,” where we’re going to surface up these exact opportunities for SkillUp workers, specific to our population, in a language and a voice and a UX and UI that meets hopefully folks where they are and, hopefully, they can take advantage of these opportunities.
Kerr: Steve, a lot of the recent legislation by the Biden administration and others has focused on workforce and new opportunities. How’s that factored into your work?
Lee: Yeah, it’s a great question Bill. In addition to that, there’s also been a lot of buzz from the administration about making sure we hire folks without a college degree. And that’s sort of SkillUp’s jam, right? But specific to the infrastructure bill, we think one of the biggest trends that we can offer SkillUp users is the skilled trades. You don’t need a lot of time to be able to get training. You don’t need a lot of money. There are lots of jobs available out there that you can start with, based on a lot the money and jobs that are coming through the bill. And then you can upskill, right, to get from an early-stage contractor into something much bigger and better. The destination to where you can be is actually really fruitful going forward.
Kerr: So Steve, tell us about some of the most important metrics that you track for SkillUp and its impact.
Lee: Great question, Bill. So today since we launched, we started about 1.5 million users that have come to our site. Roughly about 80,000 of them have been connected to an employer or training program. We’re estimating based on some of our survey data that about 10,000 have gotten the job. Our ROI on this, based on earnings over 30 years—discount the present value divided by the cost of the program—we think it’s about a 100:1 return on investment for our investors.
Kerr: Steve, that’s great. And as a final kind of question, let me have you continue with just looking around the horizon five years ahead. What do you see SkillUp doing?
Lee: I want it to be a digital public good in some manner or form, where we can take all the things that we’ve talked about around data and learnings and all that kind of stuff and mush it together to create interesting insights that we can release as a public good.
Kerr: That’s wonderful. An inspiring way to end. Steve Lee is CEO of the SkillUp Coalition. Steve, thanks so much for joining us today.
Lee: Thanks, Bill. It’s a real pleasure.
Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.