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Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire (00:04):
Hello and welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire, and I think one of the topics that we talk about most frequently on this podcast is the skills gap and the fact that there is a workforce shortage across many professions and employers have a difficult time finding skilled workers to fill various roles and the impact that that has on society and on business. And we have the perfect guest to talk about that today. It's Kiersten Barnet. She is the executive director of the New York Jobs CEO Council, and it includes the most prominent, well-known biggest CEOs across New York, but thus also across the country, names that everyone would recognize and Kiersten works with them every day on solving this problem. Kiersten, thank you very much for being with us.
Kiersten Barnet (00:58):
Thanks for having me.
Jason Altmire (00:59):
Why don't we start with just talking about the New York Jobs CEO Council, what do you do? What was the genesis of the group and what's your mission?
Kiersten Barnet (01:07):
The Jobs Council is an intermediary organization and we are charged of building a workforce and education system in New York City that works. And what I mean by that is right now I categorize our city as program rich and system poor. It's fragmented landscape. One of the biggest disconnects is between business and education, and that needs to be bridged if we want a future, as you mentioned, that's skilled, competitive and inclusive, one that doesn't leave anyone behind.
(01:34)
So our formal mission is to build a system where every New Yorker has a pathway to a family sustaining career. But we usually just say we make it easier for every New Yorker to make it. The city is home to some of the largest employers in the world. As you mentioned, these are CEOs of household name companies, Amazon, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Microsoft, and the city's also home to a massive pool of local talent. But historically, many companies haven't been hiring the people in their backyard, and many New Yorkers don't have visibility or access into those opportunities. So luckily we are founded and funded by a group of 30 New York CEOs that are committed to changing that.
Jason Altmire (02:16):
The list of companies that you are currently working with is incredible. I'm talking about... you mentioned some of them, but companies like Accenture, IBM, your chair is Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan Chase, Bloomberg, Google, Amazon, the list goes on and on. Has it been difficult to get these companies involved and what does involved mean for them? Are they active members? Are they truly passionate about the mission or are they just names on a piece of paper?
Kiersten Barnet (02:51):
That's a great question and one that I get a lot. I'll make the distinction that unlike most nonprofit organizations where the organization is built and then you find a board, we were actually built by the CEOs themselves coming together as a collective, and then they found an executive director and built an organization. So it hasn't been hard because they built this themselves. And the genesis is actually an interesting story. Jamie Dimon, as you mentioned, is our chair, and he pulled together a group of 20-ish CEOs of the largest New York employers in the private sector for a dinner in February of 2020 so just before the world changed. And the purpose of that dinner was to talk about the growing income and opportunity gaps that exist in this city, a city in which they are all very much invested in and a community that they continue to invest in.
(03:41)
And basically they said, what can we as private sector leaders do beyond philanthropy, of which they all do so much, but to help drive that change? And I think there's a recognition today, particularly among business leaders, that there is a huge opportunity and responsibility of the private sector to drive change. And that doing it collectively, investing in your account collectively, building those bridges collectively is a much more effective way to do it than operating independently in the way they might, which in their normal day-to-day businesses. So I've been here two and a half years, and I have to say it has exceeded my expectations, the level to which the CEOs are committed and involved. As you say, sometimes you see it just being a name on a piece of paper. But I think one of the reasons for that is when they started the Jobs Council, they also set a target.
(04:33)
So I mentioned our mission is to build a system that works, but we also operate with a target of our companies hiring 100,000 low-income New Yorkers into family sustaining jobs at their companies. So that's an important distinction at their companies over 10 years. And so that's them holding themselves accountable. It's also a recognition that we need to see what works and how do you know what works, well if it's working for them, it should be able to work for other employers too. And today, three years in, those companies have hired 40,000 low-income New Yorkers into family-sustaining jobs. So we're tracking a bit ahead of target. And just for reference, family-sustaining last year in New York City was $69,000. So they've hired many more New Yorkers than that, but of the low-income into the jobs that met that 69,000 threshold, it's been 40,000 in three years.
(05:21)
And then there was a sub-target of that which I'll also mention, which was hiring of the 100,000 having 25,000 of those be recent graduates of the City University of New York, CUNY. CUNY is a collection of 25 different campuses around the city and home to 250,000 degree-seeking students. So it's a rich pool of that target talent pool. And to date, our companies have hired 8,000 CUNY students over those three years, and today are hiring at twice the rate that they were when the organization started, a recognition that building these bridges between education and industry is working.
Jason Altmire (05:57):
When you're talking about CUNY and those graduates, I assume those are four-year degrees right? Those are diploma programs and then they go on to work. Is that correct?
Kiersten Barnet (06:08):
So it's actually a mixture. There are a lot of four-year degree schools. There are eight community colleges that also have two-year degrees. And then we do some work with workforce development offices around certifications, so those are non-degree seeking students. The 250,000 I mentioned, that's just degree seeking either a two-year or a four-year. Half of CUNY students come from families that earn less than $30,000 a year in New York City. So again, it's a rich pool of the talent that we're looking to attract to these companies.
Jason Altmire (06:40):
How do you identify the beneficiaries of the program? Who are the individuals that receive support and what does that support look like if you're participating on the student side?
Kiersten Barnet (06:53):
For the most part, we don't run programs ourselves. We build public-private partnerships or other partnerships to scale solutions that we see are working. A great example of that is with New York City Public Schools. We have a partnership with them around high school apprenticeships. So the Adams Administration came to us a couple years ago and said they really wanted to do more around place-based learning and apprenticeships in high school. And do we know of any organizations that are doing that effectively? Many of our companies were working with an organization called CareerWise that has a two and three-year model of apprenticeships for high schoolers intended to lead directly into jobs at large employers. And what it looks like is a student leaves school four hours a day and works 16 hours a week at JP Morgan, at Amazon and gets paid, and that's over their junior and senior year, and then the following year can do a full-year apprenticeship into a full-time job or can go on to college.
(07:53)
So it really is an options multiplier. And so I use that example because at the time when the administration approached us, it was working in I think eight public schools, and it was maybe a couple hundred students over several years had done these apprenticeships and by building a partnership with them and us bringing employers to the table, and now there are just this year I think there are 435 high school apprentices and across many more employers and also public agencies, and it's across 58 high schools.
(08:22)
So that's one example of how we find the beneficiaries. And in that sense, we leave it to the New York City Public Schools to know which high schools are the right schools. And so we are not experts on everything, and that's why you need different stakeholders at the table. And we have similar examples of when we work with CUNY whether it's at the central level or the individual college level, but everything that we do is market-driven, and it starts with what are those demands of the employers? What are the skills and competencies they're looking for? And then us working backwards on how do you make sure that whether it's students that they're learning that in the classroom or if it's adults that they're getting that training. But it always has to be market driven because otherwise it's not scalable and sustainable long term.
Jason Altmire (09:02):
As an example of the high school aspect of this that I think will resonate with career colleges is I saw you have a medical assisting program where high school students can work in high school and come out with a credential and medical assistant on the way to pursuing a nursing credential in the future. Did I read that correctly? And if so, how does that work?
Kiersten Barnet (09:28):
Yeah, I love that you brought up that example. One of the things we're really focused on when we think about that longer term systems change is alternative pathways to degrees. I think people talk a lot about alternative pathways to jobs, and we are supportive of those as well. But the fact is there's always going to be a lot of jobs that require degrees, accountants, nurses, doctors, and for that, we think it's really important that we find alternative pathways to degrees. We know that the number one barrier for people getting a degree is the immediate need to earn an income. And so what we often see is CUNY students that may drop out because they're trying to work 40 hours a week at Starbucks and also get their degree in accounting. So we look for opportunities like the medical assistant to nursing pathway where you find a paraprofessional role that you don't need a degree to do, so you can do it immediately after high school or in some cases in high school.
(10:22)
And then while you're doing that and also building the relationship with a healthcare employer and getting on the job experience, also getting a degree in a next level role, family standing role. And so the medical assistant pathway was designed so that students, they spend time in their senior year getting certified as a medical assistant, they start working at a hospital immediately after graduating, and then they enroll in their nursing prereqs that fall. And so they're earning and learning the whole way up, the hospital's paying for their tuition and they graduate knowing that they have a job and a pathway to both the degree and the job that they want.
Jason Altmire (10:56):
Talk a little bit about the educational partners. You mentioned City University of New York, some community colleges with which you are working. Talk about how you choose your higher education partners and are there any limitations on the types of schools or the geography of a school or even the setting? Is distance learning versus in-person learning distinguishing factor when you choose your students and your partners?
Kiersten Barnet (11:27):
So to date, most of our work with higher ed has been at CUNY, and again, it's 25 schools, so it is a large pool of schools to be working with or tackle it itself. And one of the reasons we like CUNY is because we know that most students there are low income, the majority are from communities of color. And so it's a great population for us to work with to help our employers hire local talent, diversify their workforce, and get skilled talent.
(11:52)
As far as what we look for in other higher ed partners, we have thought about broadening that. Right now it's just a question of bandwidth, but since we are focused on New York jobs and New York talent, we work with across the five boroughs and then also with our employers that are New York metro area, but I can't see us going much further beyond that. That said, it's a strategy you can replicate, so you could do that in other cities as well, but because the purpose is really investing in the local talent, we're focused on higher ed partners that have a lot of great local talent.
(12:24)
Some of the things we do with them, so we bring our employer partners together as a coalition. They'll send a bunch of industry experts and they'll help redesign curriculum. Amazon right now is helping redesign cloud curriculum in community colleges. We've set up last summer, 4,000 CUNY students with Google career certificates for free. These were tech students that hadn't gotten internships and CUNY Central said, "What could they do to boost their resume," and we said, "Here. Google's one of our partners," and we're able to set them up and do that. So we work with them a number of different ways. And it also partly depends on the school. I'll say we're always looking for a coalition of the willing, so we want partners that want to work with us, and we're lucky that there are a lot of them there.
Jason Altmire (13:08):
To be a part of the New York Jobs CEO Council you mentioned that a company has to agree to hire a certain number of students and graduates at a $69,000 or above threshold. And I would guess we've seen this in the types of students that we serve in our schools across the country. When students come from a disadvantaged background, sometimes a challenge is the soft skills and the ethic of the in-person work environment and something they may not have experienced with. Is there an accommodation made among these companies that hire students? Are they treated differently when they become employees with the understanding that they might not have the background to immediately assimilate in the same way that a different person might?
Kiersten Barnet (14:01):
That's a great question. And honestly, it depends on the program or depends on the solution. We have some programs that have been designed so that students with a two year degree, for example, are doing an apprenticeship at a company that's equated for credit while they're in college, and then they come into a role, same role as a student with a four year degree at the same time. So in that scenario, they're going to get the same support that the four year degree student is. They're in an entry level cohort and not treated differently at that point of entry, but were treated differently in the sense that they had the opportunity for an apprenticeship beforehand to help give them that boost given that they have only a two year degree compared to a four year degree. When we look at the high school students, for example, we do find they need much more wraparound support, mentorship, just checking in, just going to a workplace for the first time.
(14:51)
And so that's why we've partnered with CareerWise who provides that and is partners with the employers directly and they do supervisor training for employer supervisors and help set them up internally to have the infrastructure to support those high school apprentices. I will say that your point about soft skills though is a great one. We also do a lot of... we'll just collectively pull our employers together and then pull in a bunch of CUNY talent and do things like resume workshops or they do mock interviews with recruiters for the jobs that they're going to be interviewing for. And so that's another way that we try to help give them a boost going into that process where they may not be getting the same soft skills training from their services or from their background.
Jason Altmire (15:41):
Your employer partners, as we both listed, some of them are literally the who's who of the corporate community, not just in New York, but across America, and they all have offices and a physical presence for a work environment in hundreds of cities across America when you look at all of them. So is your program only limited to people within the confines of New York City or even the Greater New York area, or are you taking the show on the road and allowing these graduates to work perhaps outside of New York, but for a New York based company but in a different part of the country?
Kiersten Barnet (16:23):
Yes. The answer is yes. While we focus on as far as targeting talent, we stick with the New York metro area, but when it comes to where those job opportunities are, it doesn't need to be limited to New York. That 40,000 number is just inclusive of the New York hires. But we have had companies like Bank of America hire for roles in Charlotte or JP Morgan hire for a role in Dallas, and we're supportive of that too. I mean, we just want them to get a good job. So a good job is a good job. They're building transferable skills no matter which office they're in, and they're working for a great employer with a long-term career trajectory. But as far as our metrics and that count, and again, holding ourselves accountable for hiring local talent that is specific to New York.
Jason Altmire (17:07):
And again, just to kind of summarize and wrap up, can you list again the type of jobs that we're talking about? You talked a little bit in the beginning, but what are the specific occupations that you're dealing with and that a student would qualify for?
Kiersten Barnet (17:22):
So we look at this with our employers regularly, and we essentially map out where are the jobs that you have a demand for today? What's your demand going to look like in the future? And then again, map that backwards to ensure that the skills and competencies a student is learning in the classroom are aligned with those in demand skills that employers are going to value. And so where we see that today, today it's largely tech roles, software engineers, IT, then cyber, finance, accounting is a huge one. Interesting fact, less people are becoming accountants. It's not as popular of a track in college, not as sexy, but accountants aren't going away and they're always going to be needed. And the big four accounting firms are all members of ours and are working actively on how do you boost both the number of people that go into that as a student... into that major as a student, but also help get them through what is a slightly longer track than just traditional four-year degree, so they can become an accountant and have opportunities at their companies.
(18:18)
The other ones I'll mention are sales, which can look different in different companies, but that is another big one. And then what I call business analyst roles. Those aren't necessarily just business, but we do see a lot of employers, particularly in New York where they often have some other higher paid talent and client-facing talent that have talent that really can have any major, but they want strong analytical skills, good communication skills, presentation skills, that type of thing. And so there's certainly a need for those as well.
(18:47)
Our healthcare employers are responsible for huge number of the hires in that 40,000. And unlike some of our other companies, they need that talent yesterday. They actually have open headcount at the end of the year. They can't fill the jobs fast enough. And so healthcare is a whole different beast to solve for because it's not just about how do you get the talent, it connected with the workplace. It's also how do you expand the number of degree programs, the number of seats and the number of talent interested in going into those programs. And this is nursing and traditional jobs we think about, but also lab tech, rad tech, farm tech, which all pay great family sustaining salaries, but many students don't know what that is. So healthcare is also a huge opportunity and there's so many roles under that umbrella that are here in demand now and will be in demand in the future.
Jason Altmire (19:36):
This is such an innovative program and it's so important. And the fact that you have received the buy-in from such a significant portion of the corporate community again in America, but based in New York City is really incredible. Are you aware of any other part of the country where something like this is happening?
Kiersten Barnet (19:59):
We are a member of a group called the National Talent Collaborative, which is essentially a network of organizations similar to ours or with similar goals. Some of them are business roundtables that have a subset or some focus on workforce and education. Some are like our organization totally focused on workforce education, but all of them are business led and business funded. And so that's what they have in common. And we actually recently convened about 90 people from these organizations in New York this spring, which was a lot of fun actually. We had Jamie Dimon and Mayor Adams open up with a great panel on the importance of your local leadership being aligned in both the public and private sector. We're very fortunate to have that here. And so that group's a great group to have as a sounding board, also helps us learn what's working in other markets, in some cases avoid duplicating efforts or making the same mistakes, hitting the same puddles. So those organizations are an important network of ours and we'll continue to learn from each other.
Jason Altmire (20:56):
If somebody wanted to learn more about the New York Jobs CEO Council or find out how to get in touch with you, how would they do it?
Kiersten Barnet (21:05):
Anyone who's interested in learning more about the council can email us at hirelocal@jobscouncil.org or go to our website, which is www.jobscouncil.org. We have a lot of resources on there for both students and employers. And I will mention that with employers, we, IBM, that's one of our partners and generously built a talent portal for us. It's where we do a lot of that connecting of students with jobs. And we now are opening that up so that other employers, mid and small businesses can also post their jobs there because there are more talent now coming out of these programs than there are jobs at our member companies. And again, the mission is just to get people jobs. So if you go there, you can also find out how you can post your jobs and we'll help fill them for free.
Jason Altmire (21:48):
Our guest today has been Kiersten Barnet. She's the executive director of the New York Jobs CEO Council. Kiersten, thank you for being with us.
Kiersten Barnet (21:57):
Thank you so much for having me.
Jason Altmire (22:00):
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter @CECUED. That's at C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.