Episode Transcript
Intro:
Welcome to The SkillsWave Podcast—a podcast for organizations that want to future ready their workforces, hosted by Malika Asthana.
In each episode, guests from some of the most innovative businesses around the world share their unique approaches to learning and development. They provide specific, actionable insights into how they’re preparing their workforces for the future, and the ways they’re addressing skills gaps in their industries.
You're listening to The SkillsWave Podcast.
Malika:
Welcome to The Skill Shift. Our guest today is Chike Aguh, a Fulbright scholar educator, business leader, award-winning nonprofit CEO, and Biden Presidential appointee. A recognized authority on the future of work, economic opportuniundty and innovation, Chike is the first person in his family born in the United States, and as such is committed to an economy that creates opportunity for every family, just like America did for his. Chike currently serves as senior advisor at Harvard University’s Project on Workforce, senior fellow on workforce at Northeastern University’s Burn Center for Social Change, and senior advisor at the McChrystal Group. Previously, Chike was appointed by President Biden on day one of his administration to serve as Chief Innovation Officer at the US Department of Labor, the first black person to do so. Reporting to deputy secretary and later acting secretary Julie Su, he led efforts to use data, emerging technologies such as AI and quantum computing and innovative practices to advance and protect American workers. A proud Marylander, Chike also serves on the Maryland Higher Education Commission, appointed by Governor Westmore in 2023. Chike, welcome to The Skill Shift.
Chike:
Thank you so much for having me and really thank you all for creating a space to have these types of conversations. We don’t have enough of these conversations often enough in a serious enough manner, so really thank you for creating this important space.
Malika:
Absolutely. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today. I want to set the stage by giving some context to our listeners. We’re still in a tight labor market and we’re regularly seeing reports from employers saying that they don’t have enough skilled workers to fill their open roles. How do you respond to that?
Chike:
I think what I say is the challenge we have in America is that we have a lot of work that needs to get done in rising sectors like infrastructure, semiconductor fabrication, green technology, and also some sectors we’ve had for a long time, healthcare, childcare, elder care, and so you have all that work that needs to get done. We also have in America, historically, communities where we have workers who need work and seems separately these are two really big problems. Seen in totality, these two problems actually solve each other. What I say is the imperative right now is that companies need to find the workers from communities they’ve likely not reached out to before, likely not recruited from before, and get those workers into the work that needs to get done. This is higher than ideology. I don’t care what your politics are, I don’t care what your values are.
This is a business problem to be solved, and in the concept of solving that business problem, you actually help the country. As I likely say, this is the time when the right thing and the smart thing are the same thing, and this is the imperative right now, particularly for those in companies who are thinking about talent as a strategic resource. How do you go to communities where there are workers and bringing them into the work that needs to get done? To do that, to close the gap between those two is going to require a re-imagining of how we train and skill workers, but also it will require a re-imagining of how companies bring that talent in. This is a supply side and demand side question. If we’re frank, a lot of companies have at times forgot about the demand side, the things that they might do that keep talent out and have purely only focused on the supply side. That’s how I answer the question. Workers that need work, work that needs to get done, bring them together by changing and re-imagining practice on both sides of the equation.
Malika:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think the other piece of it, what you were just saying is that it’s not also jobs that already exist, but it’s also jobs to come. When we think about the big industries in the United States that are going to be seeing real challenges if we don’t build out the talent pipelines, from your work at labor and your work now, where do you see those big industries that are facing some of those challenges and where do you suggest that they begin?
Chike:
If we think about the jobs that don’t quite exist yet, but that are definitely coming, I put them in two categories. One category is truly jobs we’ve never seen before. Think about, oh, I think was it yesterday or the day before, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT.
Malika:
That’s right.
Chike:
Prompt engineering did not exist. That was not a job category that anyone had ever heard of. Now, you have six figure salaries for folks who can figure out how to write the exact right prompt for a ChatGPT, a Bard, Inflection AI’s tool, so on and so forth. That is truly a job that appeared out of thin air because of technological breakthrough. Then you have jobs that are in some ways applications of old jobs, but in new spaces. If you look at semiconductor fabrication, we have not built a semiconductor fabrication platinum America in 30 to 40 years.
Now, we’re doing that because we see that little tiny chip is the key for technological progress, particularly that’s the thing about geopolitical competition. We’re thinking about how do we take advanced manufacturing skills and construction skills to build a semiconductor fab? Just for your listeners, understand, a semiconductor fab is the size of a city block and costs 10 billion to build better as much as a nuclear power plant, that will employ tens of thousands of workers to get up off the ground. Then, a still big but smaller amount to run over time. These are the same skills that we used to build factories back in the day. In some ways, a lot of the advanced manufacturing skills that you’ve seen in things like automotive, but an entirely new or at least relatively new in the modern era task for America.
We have to think about those two things. I think what I say here is its time to get busy. It’s time to solve that, and it’s time to again go to these communities again, communities of color, rural communities, low income communities that frankly the unemployment is still higher than the national average. If you were to come to my home state of Maryland, we have a 1.6% unemployment rate, likely the lowest recorded in an American state ever, but that’s not equal. If you were to go to certain parts, the unemployment rate is that or even lower, and in other parts it’s three or 4X that. The question is how do we change that?
That is an opportunity. There are workers who need to work, how do we do that? Then on the demand side, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, how do we make sure we don’t put up artificial barriers that keep that worker out? The biggest tragedy would be if a worker has the skills to do the work, but because of a practice of a firm, they can never land in the job. That is a waste of economic potential. That’s a hit to your bottom line whether you see it or not.
Malika:
Absolutely. I think just reflecting on what you were saying just now, it’s also challenging that idea that even 1.6% unemployment is great and it’s a success because as you’ve mentioned a couple of times, there’s still people that need work and there are jobs that are available and we just need to bridge that gap. I want to get into your role previously at the US Department of Labor. I’ve heard you talk before about the need for a new way of thinking about the government’s role in supporting people and finding quality jobs, moving away from a social safety net that catches people to being a trampoline that propels people forward. How do you envision the roles of federal, state, and local governments in addressing these tight labor market challenges?
Chike:
It’s a great question, and I think you actually… I’ll start with the last part of your question, which is federal, state and local. In America, very different from like a Europe or Australia we have a hyper decentralized and federated system that was at times the wisdom, but at times also the frustration of the founders, which decentralizes power, but in some ways at times makes working in concert really, really hard. Let me throw out a few numbers to talk about why this challenge is so important. Then let me talk about, I think, some lessons that we learned because unemployment insurance is what I spent the majority of my time for two and a half years really thinking about and working on. During Covid, we experienced the highest job losses in American history, and I want to put them in context. Highest job losses in a single month before the pandemic was during the great recession, which everyone will remember as a really tough time.
In December of 2008, about 800,000 jobs went away. Horrible time in May of 2020, during the beginning of the pandemic, 20 million American jobs evaporated, 20X the great recession in a single month. Let’s do another thing, unemployment claims. Every week there’s a statistic you’ll here, which is unemployment claims. How many new people have filed that they need unemployment insurance benefits? The record was a year before I was born, 1982. It was I believe 692,000 claims, I might be off by it by a few thousand, in a single week. There were weeks in May, June, July of 2020 where it was 3 million, 4 million, 6 million. The record was 6.6 million and that was week after week. When I came in, I believe claims were around roughly 3 million a week, 5X almost the historical record. So this system was under tremendous stress. To counteract it is really challenging because per the 1935 Social Security Act, the unemployment system is designed as a federal state partnership, meaning every state system is slightly different or really different.
The federal government and the state government, neither one has total control over what that system looks like. It requires coordination on a grand scale, which is really, really hard in America. We can do it, but it’s really, really challenging. The first thing that I learned trying to overhaul this system, and this overhaul is still going by my really courageous colleagues who are still working at the Department of Labor in the states across the country, we need to make it invisible to the worker when they file. That the federal, state local partnership, those silos don’t mean anything to them. We used to always say the day you file for unemployment is the worst day of your life.
Malika:
That’s right.
Chike:
I can only imagine someone having to go home, say they lost their job, they feel like a failure. They have to go home to their family and say what they’re going to do. Honestly, they don’t know. We’re going to ask them in that point to navigate a bunch of bureaucracies, go to a bunch of offices, fill out a bunch of forms that aren’t clear, that are written in bureaucratise, and make a decision not just about how they get these benefits to economically stabilize them in their family, but also make a choice about where they go next. If we think being user centered, and I know for a lot of your listeners who are going to be user centered, that’s an ethos. I used to be a product manager, so I think about this a lot. That’s not the time… You have to make it as simple and as easy as possible.
The way that I think about this is ideally, this is the way that this would go. You’ll see pieces of this in the federal work currently from the Department of Labor, from the Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization. Firstly, let’s get you signed up really fast for these benefits, whatever you’re eligible for, so that you know you’re going to eat, you know can pay your rent, removing that stress so that you can now think clearly. That’s number one. Number two, what we found when we looked at unemployment insurance laid aside a bunch of other benefits like TANF, like Pell, all these other things. We ask for a lot of the same information, but we make people fill out the form over, and over, and over again. Think about the frustration that you have when you go to the doctor and you tell the same thing to four different people and you’re like, “Wait, didn’t you just…” We magnify this a hundred times during a benefit process. We should ideally make it one time, one shot.
One of the goals that you’ll hear from some of my colleagues in federal government is how do we have people be able to sign up in 20 to 30 minutes one time and get everything that they need? The next question, “Okay, my goal is not just simply to have you on a benefit, my goal is to stabilize you and help you back into the labor market.” Ideally the first question is, “Hey, what were you doing before? What skills, what capacities do you have,” one. Secondly, “What do you think you want to do next?” Thirdly, “What are the opportunities available in your local region?” Most people don’t move for a job. We actually are at one of the lowest labor mobility rates, meaning people moving over jobs that we’ve ever seen since probably the late seventies. People are generally going to get a job in 70 to a hundred miles of where they’re currently living.
In some ways that’s actually helpful because we can now say, “All right, okay, what are your options?” With that, remote work has changed it a little bit, but still the majority of jobs in America are done on site still, if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ideally it’s we help you figure out what capacity you have, what skills you have, where to go next. We give you a destination. “Hey look, you are a manager in a restaurant kitchen. You’re good. You used to work in the kitchen. When the waiters came in with the orders, you told them what stove to go to and when something came off the stove, you said what table it should go to.” We find a skill overlap between that and a line manager in a factory. It’s actually a lot of just logistics and flow management.
“Okay, how do we map you a path from where you are now in the food service industry to being in advanced manufacturing in Travis County, which is growing at 26% even during the pandemic. Okay, all right, maybe you need to get this certification or you should get a job doing this thing in the middle that’ll give you that last bit of skills that everybody need to get here.” We should help give them a destination and then we should help them get a path, A path that is proven by data. “Hey, 10,000 people like you made this transition and here’s what they did and here’s why it went really successfully.”
Then we recommend them each of those paths, like a certification program, for example, For example, “Hey, this program by outcome actually has done a really great job. We’ve seen it. Yeah, there are 11 of these logistics management programs. These two have really great outcomes we’re going to send you here, so on and so forth.” When that person walks out, they have their benefits to economically stabilize so they can think, they have their destination. “I want to be a line manager in an advanced manufacturing facility in Travis County, Texas, and wow. Here’s my path over the next 18 months to get there.”
Malika:
Yes.
Yeah.
Chike:
That’s ideally what this experience would be like. The Europeans get much closer to this, not perfect, but closer. We in America are not close. Some states are making some really interesting progress, states like New Jersey, Rhode Island, Colorado. Many, you have localities who are doing really interesting things. But we have to be honest with ourselves, we have not created what I just described at scale. That’s what we need at scale, particularly during a national emergency and particularly in a time when we are making… I was in this government when it happened, almost 2 trillion of investments in the industries of the future.
If we can do this and do it well at scale, not only have we made ourselves the leaders in semiconductors, hopefully the next generation, hopefully we’ve built all the infrastructure that we need so my kids don’t have to drive on parts of I95 and worry that it’s going to collapse like it did outside of Philadelphia, so that we are the leaders in green technology, so that my grandkids have a planet, but we’ve also changed the lives and economic trajectory of communities around this country. I see this, yes, as a technocratic labor market fit exercise, but I would argue as we think about how to bring this country back together, reduce polarization, the way to do that is through economic opportunity. This provides the best way to do that.
Malika:
Absolutely. I love that you started off by talking about the burden that individuals face. It reminds me a lot of the writing of Dr. Michelle Weise who wrote the great book, Long Life Learning.
Yeah, she’s fantastic. We had her speak at an executive summit at D2L a couple years ago, and I still think about her book, it’s right next to me on my desk right now. But she talks about this idea of how when you’re a consumer preparing to buy something, you have an endless amount of reviews to check to see about the validity of the claims when it comes to marketing. You have user experience, as you’re mentioning. There’s proof that you can put in to basically assess how valuable something is and what the return on investment will be.
Chike:
Correct.
Malika:
When it comes to education, when it comes to jobs even I think we’re way behind when it comes to that. I think with the proliferation of these shorter term credentials within the post-secondary education system and from other education and training providers, even less so than things like degrees because it’s so new and you don’t always know why people are taking them, if it’s for the purposes of promotion or advancement. I just wanted to highlight that. I think it’s really important that our institutions are also thinking about that and how to make that user experience easier for learners that are trying to basically find their way and put lifelong learning into action and getting advancement opportunities as a result of that.
Chike:
Absolutely.
Malika:
I want to shift into something you mentioned at the beginning, which is about the employer role. Often, in these conversations about the future of work and learning, it seems like it’s a little bit of a blame game. “No, you’re the problem.” “No, actually you’re the problem.” No one is really talking about how we’re solving the problems together. So let’s talk about the employer role. We talked at the beginning about the need to match people who are looking for jobs with jobs that are available. If employers are not necessarily relying on looking at someone’s credentials or their network as a starting point in hiring, but they’re looking at the skills gained, where do you advise that they start if they’re not beginning hiring by looking at that process? What are some of the models that exist?
Chike:
Let me say a thing in the answer, which is important, which is there’s enough blame to go around. Our hire system is not quite the way that we want it to be. I think again, if you look at the historical dialogue, we spent a lot of time talking about how workers need to be better and different. They need better skills, better dispositions, all this stuff. You can read that going back to before I was born, there’s a part of this which we don’t talk about, which is the immense empower of employers. I think that I really appreciate the question. I’d say a couple of things. The first thing I say is there are times I’ve gone to companies and I say, “Tell me what skills are needed for job X.” You can talk to two, three different people and get two or three different answers. One thing I’ve said to some companies is I’ve said, “You overestimate your clarity to the market about what you need and what you want.”
Malika:
Right.
Chike:
Most jobs, if you were to talk to my good friend Connor, who runs Merit America, an amazing social enterprise focused on getting people into work, he would say most jobs are composed of 32 separate component sub-tasks.
Do you know what each of those are? Can you now agree on the prioritization of those skills from one to 32? Can you also agree on what skills people need coming in versus what skills you’re willing to teach them when they’re on the job? That is a level of precision required. I’ll be honest, not every company has that level of precision around every job posting that they put up. That’s number one. Are you clear on what you want? The second thing is, and it’s the joke that I make, but I say, “Look, every computer science major from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, they’ve already been hired. All the people who you’ve recruited from places that you usually recruit from, they’ve been hired. In fact, you’re fighting over them. You have to go to different communities, recruit from different places.” I want to say probably almost 10 years ago, Harvard Business School did a survey with BCG, and they asked businesses, “How many of you have a relationship with your local community college?” I want to say it was under 30%.
“How many of you have a relationship with your local school district?” Similarly, low numbers, other institutions in these types of communities, the answers are still very low. It still shocks me the amount of businesses who do not have very elementary relationships with pipeline organizations. Again, institutes of higher education locally, not nationally, locally, community organizations, apprenticeship programs. It still surprises me. Again, you have some, I think, really outstanding folks like IBM, even parts of the technology industry in Silicon Valley are doing really well, but as a whole, there’s a lot of ground and make up in terms just literally the relationships needed. Because I still think there’s a bit of a belief that, “Oh, there’s still another comp sci major from MIT to be found.” No, there’s not. They’ve all been scooped up.
Thirdly, how are you assessing that talent? It goes back to actually what I said, firstly, you have to know what you’re looking for and now when you come forward, I’ve seen a lot of companies talk the talk around skills first talent management, skills-based hiring. But now how do you change practice? I’m from Maryland, a big industry that’s exploding here is cybersecurity. There are many jobs in the cybersecurity industry that we desperately need filled that don’t require a four-year degree. Some that don’t require a two-year degree. It requires a short-term credential program.
We have the NSA literally right up the road from me, but we still have a lot of companies who just by reflex, four year degree, that’s by reflex. I want to be really clear here, I am not one of those people who says degrees don’t matter. I actually still think that they matter, they matter powerfully, but they shouldn’t be arbitrary. It shouldn’t just be a reflex, every job requires a four-year degree. No, you should look at the skills required and say, “Does that degree confer those skills?” Similarly, we have a lot of people who have gone through a criminal justice system, paid their debt to society and are now ready and able to contribute to the workforce. But we still have two big a lag in second chance hiring.
That is a barrier for millions of people in this country who are ready and able to contribute. This is, to me, is baffling in a time when depending on how you count the data, we have 1.5 job openings for every person looking. It actually just doesn’t make sense. This is a business problem to be solved and you’re frustrating your business when you have arbitrary barriers like that.
Malika:
Yeah, and I think that that piece on justice impacted individuals is so important because it also reminds me of this principle that when you design equitably for one group, you’re actually breaking down barriers that you don’t know are impacting other groups. You think about people who are returning after years off on parental leave, as one example.
Chike:
Correct.
Malika:
Or veterans who are returning, people with disabilities who face the largest share of unemployment based on my last reading of the data. These are things that shouldn’t just be accepted as status quo, which I think makes a lot of sense.
Chike:
Absolutely. Again, I was at a panel about a month ago with the head of the Siemens Foundation, David Etzwiler, a wonderful guy, and he just said, “This is a business problem. Your politics are irrelevant, your values are irrelevant here.” Of course, they are, but even if you are opposed to this from any type of ideological point of view, they are dollars and cents, there’s math, there are jobs that I can’t… There are purchase orders that I can’t fill because there’s no one to do the work.
Malika:
Exactly.
Chike:
Therefore, I need to expand my frame for where I can get the talent from.
Malika:
You’re missing out on skilled talent.
Chike:
Absolutely.
Malika:
That is skilled through alternative routes.
Chike:
Exactly. To use my friends from opportunity at workspace, it’s exactly right. That’s the biggest tragedy for all involved because again, there people whose lives can be different and there, frankly, is a revenue that your company could be capturing if you did this the right way.
Malika:
Right. One of the things you just mentioned was this idea of skills that you need to have to be able to even enter into the job and skills that can come about after you receive some training. With traditional job interviews, it can sometimes be challenging to prove what skills a prospects says they have. How do you advise employers judge the skills job applicants bring to the table?
Chike:
That’s a great question. I’d say a couple of things. I think one, you have to, and you’ll bear with me, I think this is an important point. Particularly for most elite firms, the interview process is a episodic process. It is basically people show up one time, show you how brilliant they are, and you use that to judge if they can do a job. Very rarely, even in where we’re using case and performance exercises, does that actually mimic the job, very rarely. It also benefits people who have been lucky to go to elite places, privileged places, and be trained on how to make it through those interview processes. I know I was.
Malika:
Yep, likewise.
Chike:
There’s an equity challenge there as well. Also, you have basically people who at times perform well in the interview. We’ve all seen this, then they get on the job and you’re like, “Wait a minute, this is nothing like what I thought I was going to get.” Ideally, what you want is a process that is more longitudinal that I can see how someone performs on the job or job like environments over time and make a judgment. I used some fancy words there, but what you’re describing is an apprenticeship, that’s what you’re describing where someone comes in and over a period of time learns side by side with someone who’s an expert and a master at this particular profession. As they meet all the milestones required in that apprenticeship, at the end, they end up with a job because now you vetted them fully.
If they’ve made it through, boom, I know how you’re going to perform. When you look at the data for apprenticeships, for example, retention is higher, performance and promotion rates are higher. This pipeline that looks far more like America than other more traditional recruitment methods. What I say first is employers need to reimagine how they bring in talent. If you’re purely just doing two or three round interview episodically and that’s the only way you bring in talent, you are going to miss talent and you’re going to have roles unfilled. I think the second piece is, which is it is a burgeoning movement, which is how do we have more consistent ways to show what people can do over time? This is the conversation around learning and employment records or comprehensive learning records, which are not quite the same thing, but pretty close, which is imagine a world where… I’ll use technology because I probably know it best, someone says they’re good at user experience.
All right, I can believe you. I could have you make something for me right then, or what would be ideal is imagine I had a record that of something that I actually did, almost like a digital portfolio, vetted by someone who was there, my supervisor at the time, and said, “Nope, this is a UX that they made two years ago. Super awesome. They did it. Yeah, it has my stamp of approval.” We are slowly moving there, to a world and one can imagine… You’ve actually seen a number of types of these records that do this across someone’s entire career. Many of them based on blockchain or other types of base technologies that increases trust, increases validity. Imagine you show up to be a line manager at a factory and you can show them your learning and employment record and it shows, “Oh shoot, here’s where they managed a big order for a client and they got it there on time, stamped and approved by their employer.”
Or again, user experience, or I want to be a medical imaging tech and I have proof from the past or from a certification that I had that I can do these things all in one simple place, in control of the worker to share with the employers that they want to. That is a system-wide challenge that we have to create, lots of challenges with what I just described. Lots of great work from people like actually the folks at Walmart, some folks at the MIT Media Lab as well as a number of those who are working to pioneer this. But what you’re hearing me talk about is how do we reimagine the entire talent intake process. We need to get more and more employers. I won’t say I’ve seen this. I want to see it happen faster, but how do we get more and more employers re-imagining that whole process, not only trying to do the old process faster with more people and with more effort.
Malika:
Yeah, and I think the interesting thing of what you spoke to with learner employment records as well is that it’s not a singular responsibility of the employer or the higher ed institution to help validate those skills. It really is part and partial, both of them.
Chike:
There’s a great graphic I saw of what that ecosystem looks like. It probably has 10 to 15 different stakeholders. Some of this is actually state data. Some of this is data from potentially training providers who are unions, who are apprenticeship providers, who are local nonprofits who do workforce development. There’s enough blame to go around and there’s enough to do. There’s enough work to do here. I think, again, I’d say one of the things that we need more of in this space is more partnership, more coordination, and more pushing in the same direction because if we can get there, the results are really powerful, not just for businesses and their bottom lines, but also for communities and, I think, the country.
Malika:
Yeah, absolutely. Before we close off, I want to talk a little bit more about the whole scope of your career. We’ve talked a lot about your work with The Burning Glass Institute, the Project on Workforce at Harvard, also the US Department of Labor, but you’ve also been an educator and you’re also at the Maryland Higher Education Commission. I think one of the really interesting and striking things about your background is you have that experience across the entire workforce development ecosystem from K to 12 into career and technical education, colleges and universities and employment. I’m wondering what kinds of topics do you think need to cut better across that entire ecosystem to really talk about creating a more sustainable supply chain for talent acquisition?
Chike:
It’s a really great question. I’d say less topics, a little more experiences. I think a couple of things. One, I think… This is particularly true, I taught in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, right near the school that the movie Lean on Me is based on, in one of the, at that time poorest communities in the country. I also taught abroad, and I think about particularly for our most underserved students, what do we need to do? Because generally, if you do things for those students, you generally get great consequences for everyone else. A couple of things, one, we need a balance between what I call the just in time skills and the timeless skills, that’s what I mean by that. The just in time skills are where we are teaching students things that are in response to the moment.
For example, I want more students exposed to more technology far earlier in their careers. My son is six years old, my daughter is about to be two. Their comfort recreationally with technology is crazy.
Malika:
Absolutely.
Chike:
We need to figure out how we focus that in the educational environment. I want students learning the basis of profit engineering as young as possible because that’s going to be part of what they do because those tools are going to be basic productivity tools. They’re not actually going to be jobs anymore. The same way that you wouldn’t hire someone who couldn’t use Google search in two years, if someone can’t use strategy to increase their productivity, we won’t hire them because that’ll be as basic as Microsoft Office, so that’s one. There’s a collection of skills that are in response to the biggest breakthroughs in innovations of the moment.
We also need to teach students what I call the timeless skills. These are the things that human beings have been doing for thousands of years. This is leadership, communication, debate, partnership across difference, comfort with ambiguity. These are what we would at times call critical thinking, leadership. All this is critical and there’s never too young to start those things. I’d say that balance has to start as early as possible and go across the student’s entire career and training, higher education, so on and so forth.
The second thing I say is what are the types of experiences? I say this as someone who was an educator, started my career there. Started my career in the largest school system in this country. We still to this day too much think of school as “I go to a building at nine and I leave at three and I spend my time in the four walls of a classroom.” That cannot be the paradigm going forward because the world doesn’t look like that. The classroom is very valuable. I think that didactic and ideally Socratic back and forth between teachers and students, and really students between each other is powerful and needed. But we need to think of education more like being an athlete. This is what I mean by that, if you were an athlete… I’m not sure if you were, I was an athlete, not a great one. But if you do basketball, you don’t read a book on how to do a jump shot.
You watch someone do a jump shot, then you do it, you do it wrong the first time. Someone watches you and coaches you and you do it over, and over, and over again until you get better. Then they put you in a real game situation and you do it again and your coach watches you. Then you go back and you retool. That’s how athletics and sports works. That’s actually how the job market works. If you think about you on the first time you’re on a job, that’s what happened. You went to a meeting and you said something you weren’t supposed to.
Hopefully someone was good and pulled you aside and said, “Hey, I would say it this way next time.” You go to another meeting, they see you again. They’re like, “All right, that was way better, but try it this way next time,” so on and so forth. That’s how we need to think about this and students need to have experiences like that as soon as possible. If I could wave a magic wand, every student would have work experience before they left K12, as early as possible. Why? One, because I think that’s just what prepares them for the world. Secondly, if we’re honest, the most privileged and the wealthy people among us are doing that.
Malika:
Right, whether it’s volunteering, or internships, or shadowing your parents or something.
Chike:
For sure. Exactly. They gave us experiences. The question is, I had Jeffrey Canada, who I deeply admire who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone. He was asked once why he teaches his students chess. He’s like, “It’s a good question.” There’s no research that says chess mix on my students better. But he said, and I always remember this, it was like 15 years ago, he said, “When in doubt, do what rich people do.” That’s cheeky and it’s funny, but there’s a kernel of truth there. There are things that the most well-to-do among us have been doing for their kids for a very long time and for their young adults a very long time. The question is how do we ubiquitous that to everyone, so that one, our economy benefits, but also those individuals and those communities benefit.
Malika:
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I think that piece is going to stick with me too, that chess story. It’s great and I appreciate the cheeky bit, but it is also, I think, bringing the learning into your life. It’s not over complicating it and saying, “This is how strategy works, and this is game theory, and this is understanding levels of power and hierarchy, but let’s play a game and see what you learn along the way and how you bounce back from your mistakes, and how you can anticipate risk and avoid really dangerous risk and be okay with some others.” I think that’s so important because the best educators in our society are the ones that are doing that. They’re spending time thinking so creatively about lesson planning and building that fun into the experiences and making it more natural. There’s a sense of curiosity that’s developed over time. There’s that problem solving all of it, so I love that story.
Chike:
I say when I think about the most powerful education experiences that I’ve had, it’s actually been where I’ve had an experience out in the world, and then I came back to the classroom and I tried to deconstruct it with someone who was really sharp, who asked me to… Those have been the most powerful, where something happened, maybe it didn’t go well, and then we came back and said, “Okay, what happened there? Why?” The question is, and we think about that as higher education. We think about that as really advanced. No, no, we should be doing that with kids. That should be a child’s default experience in the educational system from the first time they step into a school, the first time they step onto a campus, from the first time they go into a workplace.
How do we keep that across? Because that’s what the world is going to require. I think it always required this, but it definitely does now because the world is too complicated, the economy is too complicated, particularly when you lay on the technologies that are changing, forget will change are already and have already changed how people do work.
Malika:
Right, and businesses are looking for that innovation.
Chike:
Absolutely. It’s a hundred… You didn’t ask me this, but I’ll say when I hear from businesses what do they need? Yes, they talk about there are these technical skills that I need, but what I more here is there are these timeless skills that they need. I’m sure you’ve heard of this as well. “I’ll train them on the rest. If I can have someone who has these higher order skills,” and I particularly hear this from multinational employers who are thinking about not just hiring the United States, but in emerging markets from Africa, to Asia, to Latin America. That’s what they most want, are most looking for because they’re saying, “Not just who can do this job right now, but who’s going to lead my firm one day when I’m not here?”
Malika:
“Who do I trust to bring all that together and create great cultures?” That’s all a part of it. That’s fantastic. We’re coming to the end of our time. I want to ask you one last question. What gives you hope as you look ahead?
Chike:
What gives me hope is two things. One, the amazing work that I see for people like my colleagues at the Department of Labor, formally from people on the ground in communities that most people will never hear of or see, but who are doing this work. Then I would say lastly, in some ways, the road that my own family has walked in this country. You said it at the beginning. My family is from a village in the far east of Nigeria that most Nigerians themselves will never go to and never see. My grandparents didn’t go past middle school, any of them. My parents were born on streets that were unpaved then and are mostly unpaved now. They had Peace Corps volunteers in their classrooms. What changed for them was they got golden tickets to come and study here in the United States of America at public universities. I sit here as the first person in my entire family born in America, and up and through this last April, got to serve an American president.
That gives me hope because it shows what’s possible in a very short period of time in the life of a family. I think the question is how do we take the things that serendipitously happen in my family and have them happen systemically for everyone? That’s the game and the charge right now. That’s what I try to devote myself to, but just knowing my own life, that’s what’s possible. If you see over my left shoulder, you’ll see a picture of me and my family. When I think about what’s possible for them going forward and what I want them to be working towards going forward, it’s how do we replicate the opportunity that I’ve experienced for everyone.
I think about my old boss, Julie Su, who is the acting Secretary of Labor currently. When she was nominated for the role, she talked about her very similar story to mine. Her mother came from a rural village in China, in a cargo plane. She couldn’t even afford a seat and came to California. Her dad ran a laundry mat. Her mom used to clean rooms in a union job in a hotel, and is now the acting Secretary of Labor of the United States of America.
Again, she would say a lot of that happens serendipitously, but how do we replicate for others what she’s experienced? When I say if we’ve told you a lot of things that we’ve talked about, my vision, my hope is that someone’s going to be on a podcast like this talking to someone super smart like you. They’re going to say, “Because some business did skills-based hiring, my dad got a job, he wouldn’t have gotten a job otherwise. That’s why I was able to go to school and be here with you,” or “Because, shoot, no, my mom was in the justice system and came out and someone gave her a shot because they saw that she had the skills, and that’s why I’m here with you.”
Those are stories that are possible because a company went to the east and west side of Baltimore to go hire for a new plant that they were building, and they never had gone there before. They said, “No, but we have to do this because it’s the right thing and it’s a smart thing for my business, and that’s why I’m able to sit here in front of you.” That’s what’s possible if we do all the things that we’ve talked about. Again, the right thing and the smart thing are the same thing. But I’ve been surprised, not surprised, but hardened for businesses who I have seen grab onto that mission. I think for people, folks in your audience, for folks like me, we need to help them figure out how.
Malika:
Yes.
Chike:
That’s why I’m trying to do for the rest of my career. I think that’s what the work is for me, and I think for all of us going forward.
Malika:
That’s fantastic. Well, it’s a great place to end and thank you for sharing that. Thank you for your time, Chike.
Chike:
Thank you so much.
Outro:
Thanks for listening to The SkillsWave Podcast. Check out skillswave.com, Spotify and Apple Podcasts for links to the resources we discussed in this episode, related content, additional episodes and more.
Thanks for joining us.
