Chike Aguh on Workforce Development Strategies for the Future

Work Forces

Chike Aguh is a trailblazer in workforce innovation, currently serving as Senior Advisor with The Project on Workforce at Harvard. He previously served as inaugural Chief Innovation Officer at the US Department of Labor under President Biden. Drawing upon his unique cross-sector experience, Chike shares his insights on the key problems and opportunities shaping the future of work and learning. He outlines his framework for bridging the gap between open jobs and those seeking to advance their careers, covering critical areas like defining future skills needs, developing innovative training models, and supporting career transition and advancement. Chike provides practical advice for employers, educators, policymakers, and workforce practitioners to build an inclusive talent development ecosystem.

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Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in. Today we're joined by Chike Aguh. Chike is a trailblazer in workforce innovation who has made significant contributions to American labor and education. Chike currently serves as senior advisor at Harvard University's Project on the Workforce, senior fellow on workforce at Northeastern University's Burnes Center for Social Change, and senior advisor at the McChrystal Group. As the inaugural chief innovation officer at the US Department of Labor under President Biden, he was pivotal in employing data and emerging technologies to enhance American workers' lives. Chike was also founding leader of the Education Design Lab’s Community College Growth Engine Fund. He holds appointments with the Council on Foreign Relations, New Market Ventures, and the Higher Education Commission in Maryland. Chike earned degrees from Tufts University, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks for joining us today, Chike.

Chike Aguh: It is my pleasure to be here and just thank you for having me and thank you for having this kind of space and to have these types of conversations.

Julian: Yes, Chike, really appreciate you joining us and we're very much looking forward to this conversation. And I guess to kick us off, if you would tell us a little bit about your background and how you approach your work.

Chike: For folks who know me, I like to say that kind of the path I'm on probably starts before I was born. And so my family, for those who don't know, my family is a very classic immigrant story to America. My family is from a far and out of the way village in Nigeria that most Nigerians themselves will never go to and never see. My grandparents, none of them went past middle school. My parents were born on streets that were unpaved then, they're unpaved now. They had Peace Corps volunteers in their classrooms and what changed for them and by extension for me was they got the opportunity to come study here in the United States of America at public universities in the late 70s. And so my dad went to UT in Texas, my mom went to Rutgers University in New Jersey, and I'm the first person in my entire family born in America. And I got to serve an American president. And so I've always tried to think about how do you replicate that arc for more families like it existed in my family. And if we know by the data, that arc is not usual. And the question is, how do we make it more usual? How do we make it more systemic versus serendipitous? And I think part of my theory of the case has always been that education and skills are a pathway, if not the prime pathway, to economic opportunity. And so that's why I spent really the majority of my career really in education and skills. And that's been everywhere from K-12 all the way now to the workforce and the talent and kind of future of work space. So that's kind of how I've approached the work. The only other thing that I'll say about how I have tried to approach it is I've had generally an interdisciplinary career across sector, across discipline. And it comes from, I think, a very elementary but I think important insight very early in my career that the problems we're solving, no one can solve alone. Whether that's one sector alone, one organization alone, one branch of government alone. It requires kind of all of us. You'll hear President Biden, who I got the honor to work for. He would talk about a whole of government approach for a lot of big problems. And I would always try to take it a step further, which is we need whole of society approaches to big problems like this. And again, creating an economy that kind of includes all of us, creating a future of work that includes all of us is I'd argue the biggest problem in front of us as a country and even as a species.

Julian: Yeah, it's funny. I often like to say that workforce development is a multidisciplinary undertaking. At the very least, you need the employers and the educators and trainers getting together, which is no small feat.

Chike: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kaitlin: So building upon that Chike around these big problems, what are the key problems you're seeing in your work regarding the future of work and learning? Like if we break it down a little bit, because there are so many problems and opportunities.

Chike: So let me frame the problem and the opportunity, and then let me frame, I think, the questions you have to answer. So the way I think about it is, and I make it very simple because when I talk to smart people like you, I have to break them down for myself. There's a lot of work in America to be done, whether it's in the semiconductor industry, whether it's in green technology, whether it is in infrastructure, whether it's the care economy, whether it's allied health. We have a lot of work in America that needs to get done. When I came into government in January of 2021, we had roughly three jobs for every one person looking out there in the economy. Right now, we're probably at 1.25, 1.5 to every one person looking. And if you go to certain sectors, that number is much higher. Three, four, five, six, seven to one in terms of jobs available versus people looking. On the other side of the chasm, you have a lot of people who need work, who historically have needed work. And we know where they live. We know that they are in our rural communities, our low-income communities. We know these are communities of color, communities of immigrants, women, people with disabilities. And the thing is, those parts of the economy are actually the workforce, excuse me, are the ones that are actually growing. So you have a lot of people that need work. You have a lot of work that needs to get done. Big two, really big problems, but if you bring them together, they actually solve each other. The challenge is they're not close together. There's a chasm between the two of them and we need to build a bridge between the two to get that opportunity fully realized. And so I argue to build that bridge, you need to answer, I call them my five key questions. First question is let's be precise on exactly what is the work of the future. Not just in terms of sectors, but in terms of occupations and what those occupations include. If you were to talk to my old friend Connor who runs Merit America, he would say, every job has 32 component subtasks. Being really prepared about what those tasks are, not the technical, meaning kind of, I think what I call it, if you're a sports guy, the X's and O's, but also these, what they would call professional, 21st century power, pick your term, skills that are hard to count but are indispensable. We need to know what those skills are across every occupation so people know what they're aiming towards, whether you're a worker, whether you're a trainer, whether you're an employer. And I'll be honest, we're not always as clear about those as we want to be. There are amazing people doing work on that now. My colleagues at Harvard, my colleagues at the Burning Glass Institute, a number of folks who are trying to get more precision. And we have to keep those definitions about the work of the future up to date as things change. If you think about the meteorite that generative AI has been in the workforce since late 2022, it's created an entire class of jobs that literally didn't exist, didn't exist. And there will be more technologies that have the same effect. We have to keep up that definition of the work of the future. Secondly, how do you train people for that work? Really critical. Right now, we have, since ancient times, what's generally happened is you sat next to someone who knew how to do the job, and you watched them, and you did it. The challeng is, that's much harder now because of distance, because of, at times, systemic barriers that keep people out. And now, how do we create entirely new forms of training using emerging technologies like XR? How do we think about frankly resurrecting old models like true apprenticeship like you see in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and now gaining steam here in the United States and places like the UK. But we need new systems of training and again going back to the first one how do we make sure that we it's getting at the X's and O's of those jobs, but also those power skills that we know are critical all of us have heard employers say you know what just give you a person with the right mindset the right attitude and I'll come in and I'll train them. It's a bitch right but there's a bit of truth there about how important those skills are. And at times, our training doesn't get at both sides of that equation. At times, what I call the just-in-time skills and the timeless skills that we've been teaching since humanity was very young. Third question, how do the work and the worker find each other? This is a question we don't talk about a lot or nearly enough. We assume, if you took economics, we always assume perfect information. So if there's a job out there that fits a worker's skills and there's a worker out there that has those skills, they'll just find each other. That's not what happens. It's not what happens. We have, and I'll use a small example here, we had a, probably about in my home county of Prince George's, about nine years ago, the building of the largest casino on the eastern seaboard by MGM, right on the shores of the Potomac River. Beautiful place to go see a show, go have a night out at a restaurant. But for years, they had open jobs in things like food service, CDL, driving, groundskeeping. These are jobs that actually don't take a lot to train for. We had hundreds of those jobs open. If you were to go 35 minutes to neighborhoods that are kind of underserved, like people who are level will know these neighborhoods, Temple Hills, Fairmont Heights, Suitland. We had people who needed work. In my home county, which is a majority black county, our unemployment rate usually runs about two points above the Maryland average, almost historically. So you literally you have hundreds of jobs and you have people who need work literally a half hour from each other. But they don't find each other. Why not? People who live there may not know those jobs exist. One. Two, transportation in my county is not easy in terms of getting from one place to another. Three, and I don't know this for MGM, but for a lot of candidates, are there systemic barriers like justice involved? Is that a barrier for me getting in the door? Are there arbitrary degree requirements? Again, degree requirements are not bad, but they can't be arbitrary. So on and so forth. And many others. But we have this assumption that work and the worker find each other, and that doesn't happen by itself. Fourth, how do you support people when they fall out of the labor market or want to change in the labor market? Meaning, right now in America, and I worked on unemployment insurance for two and a half years when I worked at the Department of Labor. It was the first thing I did when I came in and I think the last meeting I had before I went out. Right now, we have a safety net at best. In fact, someone decided once it's a safety net with holes in it. What we really want to move to is an economic trampoline. When you fall out of the labor market, this system of benefits would catch you and help bounce you back into the labor market at at least as good a place as you were before, and ideally, actually a better place than where you want to be in the future. We don't have that right now. And so we need to figure out, OK, how do we, number one, when people fall out of the labor market, economically stabilize them so that they and their families don't go destitute, can pay their rent, get the groceries, and as or more importantly, get them the skills and the tools that they need to get back in the labor market and get back on the job, get back on the course to a career that they want to be in and that is useful for them and the country. We don't have that system at scale right now and we have to get there and get there quickly because of all the changes that are happening in the economy and because of disruptions that may come due to new technologies. Last piece, and this is a question that my time at labor really crystallized for me. How do you make sure that once someone is on the job, they are respected, protected, dignified, and advancing. So I'll use an example. In late 2021, you might remember this, we were worried if Christmas gifts were gonna get to the American people because we had all these big freighters off the coast of California near the port of LA and the port of Long Beach that couldn't land and they couldn't get their goods in. Why? Because we didn't have enough truckers to take them from the port to all parts of the country. Now, the initial analysis for many, many smart people was, oh, we need to get more truckers, we need to train more people, so on and so forth. I happened to work for Julie Su, who was the Deputy Secretary of Labor at the time, and is now the Acting Secretary of Labor. She also had been the Secretary of Labor of the state of California, and knew this place quite well, and so she pointed something out. We have, depending on the numbers, a six-figure amount of people who have CDL licenses who choose not to drive. Why don't they choose to drive? If you were to go to Amazon right now and look up a book on the trucking industry, there's only one. Do you know what the title of that book is? The title of that book is Sweatshop on Wheels. In many ways, it is a really tough job. It's a really tough job that a lot of people have said, you know what, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be away from my family that much. I don't want to drive that many hours a day. I don't want to. And so they choose not to drive it. And in some ways, that not being a good job kept people out of it and it hurt the country. Similarly, when people go on the job, people don't just want to stay and do that job forever. They want to advance. Are people advancing? You know, my colleagues at Burning Glass Institute who created the American Opportunity Index to look at mobility within companies once folks get in. That's a critical question, particularly in a very tight labor market where people have choices. So it's not just about what you pay them, not just about the benefits you give them. A lot of them are going to want to know, where am I going to be two years from now, three years from now, five years from now and you have to have an answer. So it's not just so in probably in a tight labor market and also an American workforce that actually is not really growing. It's at best stagnant and at worst it's shrinking a little bit. You have to retain workers if you are an enterprise. So as we think about how do we draw the bridge between the work that needs to get done, the people who need work have to answer those five questions. What is the work of the future? How do you train people for it? How do you make sure the work and the worker find each other? How do you support people when they fall out of the labor market? And how do you make sure that once people are on the job, they're respected, protected, dignified, and advancing? Answer those five questions and we bring those things together. And I argue we reap a huge economic opportunity. And I'll say one last thing here, and it's a question that you didn't ask me. Why do I think this is so important? My view is that that is the bottleneck to a robust and an equal and inclusive economy and a competitive economy. And I would argue it's also one of the things that's going to help us solve other problems like you know, the fact that we're warming the planet, the fact of deep political division. I generally believe that it is easier for people to work together to solve big problems when they are not economically destitute. So I believe it has a mediating effect on all these other problems that frankly, we see on the news every single day. So that's how I frame it. And then from there, it's easier to, I think, place particular projects, solutions, and kind of policy questions.

Julian: Yeah, now you frame the problem and the sort of path forward beautifully, Chike. So where would you like to help lead us to the space?

Chike: The challenge is you have to do all of it. Not every single person has to do all of it, but you know, some people say, what if I had only one dollar, what would you do? It doesn't work that way if you only do one of these or a couple you will still have problems. It's kind of like if you're in a ship that's got a couple of leaks, if you don't repair all the leaks, the ship still sinks. It might sink more slowly, but it still sinks. We've got to do all of it. And so I'll say a couple of things in each of those categories that I think are really important that I think about a lot. So on the what is the work of the future, I focused a lot when I was in government on what we call critical needs industries. Again, these industries that have good jobs, that have low barriers to entry, and that are critical for the country's semiconductor construction, the care economy, so on and so forth. I think focusing on those jobs, particularly because they have deep shortages, that is a place where you can bring about those partnerships between higher education providers, non-ed providers, government, employers, because they have an economic imperative. I've always said to folks who are doing workforce development, go to people who are desperate. And by people, I mean employers. Folks who don't have that burning need, it's going to be harder to create those partnerships. Focus on the folks who do. So that's, I think, number one. I think on the training piece, this is the time for innovation. This is the time to try new form factors. Again, resurrected apprenticeships in new industries using things like XR and online means. And mixing those types of form factors to do new types of education is really, really critical and I'm having to kind of dive deeper there. On the work and the work of finding each other. My colleague Joe Fuller at Harvard talks about the need for a ways for careers. We need a career navigation apparatus for people that can follow them throughout their careers. Basically, when people are looking for a new career, we say, go with God, figure it out. That's what we say at scale. People who are lucky maybe can get in front of a counselor. But what we actually should have is I'd argue, a people-based but also technology-empowered way for people to figure out what they want to do next and where exactly that path is. On the safety net piece, the economic trampoline piece, in many ways this is a public policy question. Again, I spent a lot of time on this. I can tell you how I think unemployment insurance should look very different. But the key thing that I would say, which I think is a place where a lot of states and localities can do better. When people are applying for unemployment insurance or getting unemployment insurance, they should literally not be allowed to leave the transaction without being put on a path to new skills, new jobs. Some states do this well, some states don't. But when we have that interaction, we cannot let that person leave without helping put them on a different path. And again, you have some states like Rhode Island, New Jersey, who are doing amazing work on this. States like Colorado, who are trying to do amazing work on this. And then the last piece. And I'll use one example. How do we make jobs that we need done better so that people actually wanna fill them? And I'll use one small example. When I was at the Department of Labor, we had a presentation from two researchers from the University of Chicago, if I remember correctly. And one of the things they looked at was unpredictable scheduling. And I might get these figures wrong, and so if I do, I apologize to my colleagues from the University of Chicago. But it was something like, and they said retail workers, think about folks who work in the mall, so on and so forth. A third of workers in America are in jobs like that. And those third of workers don't know what their schedule is going to be three days in advance, which is a crazy figure. Think about all of us who have children or have families. If I didn't know my schedule three days from now, I don't know how I would live my life. It's impossible. And so if you ask employers, why do you schedule folks like that? Well, they say, well, our customer demand changes that much, therefore we have to schedule that way. And so when these researchers looked at the actual data, they found that customer demand was actually much more predictable than worker scheduling. And what they found was, hey, look, these tools they're using to schedule are over-assuming customer demand. And if you actually just make things in line, you could give workers a much better quality of life because they would know what their schedules are and likely you would retain them longer, which is less training. You have less less billets open, so on and so forth. So there are things like that. We always focus on wage and benefit, which, of course, is key. But there are these other things that are critical to a good job. If I were to jump out that I couldn't do it, I would quit because my family couldn't take it. Most of us would, who have the ability to. The people who stay in those jobs, a lot of times are workers who have no other choice. And the question is, how do we frankly reduce the amount of jobs that people take because they don't have any other choice? So again, long answer to the question, but these are some of the vein of solutions that I see across this space.

Kaitlin: So as we think about practical steps, right? Like as you're getting, that last example, I think was a great one where it's like, okay, what's something that can happen, maybe not easily, but readily to help support workers? What are other practical steps for our audience and what they can do to become forces in the future of work and learning, recognizing the complexities we currently face?

Chike: So let me focus on the interaction between a training provider, whether you're a community college, you're a higher, you're a four year, you're a nonprofit and the employer. In the end, it is the critical interaction and then the worker is in the middle. So literally, you know, I imagine it like in this weird circle, and then there's the worker in the middle, who's the end user. Let's talk this time about from beginning to end, ideally from when there's an employer need and also a worker need, all the way to ideally a worker in a job that's serving their needs as well as the employer's. The first thing, and I'm going to name some things that I don't see enough. So one, workforce development, and it's a basic thing, must start from an employer need. Gina Raimondo, who's the secretary of Commerce, when she was the governor of Rhode Island, she used to talk about, we can't do the train and pray approach, which is, I train you and I pray that there's a job at the end. If it was up to me, those programs would not exist. They wouldn't. You cannot, it is unfair to take someone and train them, make them take time away from their family. If they leave, they're not being paid, which a lot of them are not, and then not be able to at least give them a line of sight to a job. That can't happen in America, particularly when there are jobs. And so that is, I think, a challenge. So one, it has to start from the employer need, that's one. Two, if you are a training provider, you need a level of collaboration with the employer to craft your training that is uncomfortable. A lot of folks have, oh, I have my quarterly council meeting with my employer, we sit, we talk about what we should do, that's my employer collaboration. It's not good enough. The collaborations that I have seen that are really powerful are literally employers with training providers weekly. They're seeing training happen and they're saying, all right, you know what, I know we did this as topic one, this really should be topic four, topic five should actually be topic one because of this change that's happening in my industry. That's the level of collaboration that you need. And it's uncomfortable. Employers are not used to it. Providers are not used to it. But that's what it has to be. Then, of course, you're kind of watching that talent kind of over time. And by the way, as folks are going through training, we have to, transportation helps. Some folks are gonna need childcare help. Some folks are gonna need, like, we need that wrap-around services to make sure that people make it through. Because one of the not dirty secrets, but it's the same thing we don't talk enough about, a lot of folks who start programs don't finish. And a lot of times it's not because they can't do the materials. It’ that life intervenes, and we gotta make sure that life doesn't intervene. But before we go on, one thing I did mean to say was, on the front end, when we're talking about crafting what these programs look like, employers need to be very clear on the skills required for the job that's being trained for. And I have said to many employers, you overestimate how clear you are about that to the market. A lot of them are not as clear as they think they are. And even internally at times, you can ask different people what skills are required for the same job, and you get different answers within the same firm. That is actually on the employer to be very clear about. Jump forward. Another place where I think employers need to do better is let's assume that the program did its job. They train people, the people are ready. Do you have a clear path from the end of that program into a job? And this is at times where HR is actually, it doesn't necessarily move as fast or as fast as we would like. And it does at times, it is not as times as easy and adaptable as really compared to government or compared to higher education. Is there a clear path? Or are they still putting their application in in the same docker that everyone else is? Is the program that they just did at your direction being recognized by HR so they can get in and get in front of a hiring manager? If the answer's no, then you just have that person do all that for nothing. Because they might as well have just applied and potentially not get the same result. And then once they're in, what's the path? That is the critical interaction that has to happen. And each of those things, I believe, is firmly within the control right now of the providers and the employers or together. So those are practical things they can have. They're not easy. They're clear, but they're not easy. And they are not status quo, but they have to be done. And if we could get that right in America and in communities, a lot of the other problems become easier to solve. Right now, sadly, we don't have a scale. And we have it in pockets, but not at scale. It's a system that does that entire thing that I described. And if you look at the countries who are more successful, they have that at scale.

Julian: Great advice. And our audience is really a mix of practitioners and policymakers. And so the minute you said scale, I'm like, and what can the policymakers do to make this scale? And I'm thinking federal and state. I mean, you know, you have a really great perspective on all of it.

Chike: I would say a couple of things. And I'm thinking about some of my colleagues who I used to work with at the Department of Labor who are debating these questions right now on the federal level with reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, but also on the federal level. Dollars for workforce development should follow Two things, One, employer demand. You cannot train for jobs that do not exist Secondly, they must go for good jobs, and when I say good jobs, and again, you can look at the framework the Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce came up with for what a good job is. To be honest, I don't necessarily know if I want public dollars funding jobs that aren't good. And when I say good I use a very simple thing. Do I want these two kids what I have over my shoulder whose picture I have over my shoulder? Is it a job with good wages, good benefits, freedom from discrimination, freedom to organize, predictable scheduling, and that leads to a career? Dollar should be focused on those two things, jobs that employers need, and jobs that are gonna make workers' lives better. And I'll say a third thing, these should flow towards training programs that actually produce results. Right now, if we're candid, we have a bell curve of effectiveness in workforce development. We have some folks who do an amazing job. We have a lot of folks that don't. And to be honest, particularly in a ffiscally constrained environment that I lived in when I was in for my two and a half years of labor, and it was just even more the case now, we can't afford to put dollars towards programs that aren't producing for workers and for employers. We can't. And to be honest, I'll go a step further. It actually, in some ways, if I was a good provider, I'd be annoyed if I'm doing my job and frankly, you should be giving, they should get more money and folks who are not doing their jobs should get less. That's a controversial thing that I may have said. And one thing that I'll say is one critique at times we'll get of that is, well, if I fund based on effectiveness, then folks will be hesitant to take on folks with, what we say, chronic barriers to employment. I think there are ways to incentivize around that. You actually see it in some ways in the K-12 space, where basically you have funding based on weights of student disadvantage, whether they be immigrants, people in Section 8 housing. I think there are ways to do that. But what we can't say is that effectiveness doesn't matter. We can't say that. We cannot. So that's, I think, how dollars should flow. Number two, we need better data on what happens to people once they leave workforce development. At scale, we don't know. I met so many providers who, oh, I do a survey. I do, look, the folks who answer surveys, it's like anything else. They're either really happy or they're really mad, but it doesn't get to the broadest wealth of what happened. And that's why I need to know. This is where we need to, I think, leverage IRS tax data, the UI wage record, things like that. And that is a policy thing. And we need, policymakers need to make that data easier to share across silos. And, conversely, they need to make sure that that data is secure and it is private. So I'll use one key example. One of the concerns is let's say that, so one thing that I want to know about workers who go to workforce development is what did they get paid when they went into the job? One can argue that if I'm an applicant, I don't necessarily want my employer to know what I made in my last job because we actually know it as deep wage inequality impacts in terms of prior salary. There are actually ways to fix that. You basically, I don't need to know the aggregate. I don't need to know what Kaitlin made in her last job or what Julian made in his last job. But there are ways to solve that, but that's a policy thing. And then let me say one last thing, which is I think policymakers, and this is not about money, this is about convening. I think for critical industries and it's happening now, we need to get trainers and employers together. That is a legitimacy that the government has, whether it's the federal government, when I was at the Department of Labor, we did it a lot. When I was at the state level with Governor Patrick, when I was at the city level with Mayor Bloomberg. That is a particular power that government has, and I would argue is under-leveraged in terms of creating those partnerships to get that going. And so these are things that I think government actors can do, but those are some of the things, and I have so many more. I think that the way the unemployment insurance looks, it could be far more robust and far more effective in terms of getting people back in the labor market. I think it needs to tie it better to other benefits. It needs to have a more of what we call a no wrong door approach. So no matter what benefit you're going for you likely need help getting back in the labor market. Let's make sure that if you're applying for a snap or for TANF or for Pell we're connecting you immediately before you leave the interaction here with resources to get you to where you want to go. Again that Ways, that career navigation or GPS for where people want to go to the labor market. So those are some things I believe policymakers can do to get to scale. And let me say one last thing, and it's not about government, but it's about what I've watched in those countries that have it, the Germany's, the Austria's, of the world. It is very common there to start at different points in the training system, the education system, and still end up in a great place. You have many CEOs of their biggest companies, I think about Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance. I think he may even the head of UBS, who started off as apprentices. And then maybe they went back for a graduate degree later and came back and they have this helpful weave and almost shoots and ladders system, which is designed. And they have a system where it doesn't matter where you start, you can still end up at a great place. We in America are not there. Part of it is the way we design it. But part of it, if we're honest, is also how we view where you start. We still view people who have college degrees in a different light than a few people who don't. And I'm not someone who says degrees don't matter. I think they do, but they shouldn't matter arbitrarily. They shouldn't be the only way that you can prove that you can do a thing. I'm from Maryland. We are a national leader in cybersecurity. Why? Because we have the NSA literally right off the road from me at Fort Meade, as well as a huge ecosystem of firms that do this work. If you look at cybersecurity, there are a number of really amazing jobs that don't require a college degree, a four-year degree. Some don't require a two-year degree. You can go take a Google certificate for $150 in cybersecurity and actually be, in many ways, market ready.And by the way, that's another critical industry that we need filled, that we don't have nearly enough people to do. So as part of it, which is not just what can government do, but what can we, as Americans, in terms of how we view the economy and how we view training, to make sure that, no matter where you start, you can still end up in a great place, and that will not be held against you.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. So this is it's really helpful to hear you talk through, Chike, both what business leaders can be thinking about, what policymakers can be thinking about as we take really this more holistic approach to how we rethink workforce and talent development nationally and learning from international examples as well. And I'm wondering, as we close out today, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow the work that you're doing?

Chike: I'm easy to follow on LinkedIn. I'm usually the only Chike Aguh on whatever platform you're going to look for on LinkedIn, on Twitter. So that's one. Two, I recommend a couple of organizations that I do work with. I think the world of Burning Glass Institute. Let my great friend, Matt Sigelman, Paul Fain, who was on your podcast earlier, his newsletter is fantastic. I think about Joe Fuller and Managing the Future of Work, their podcast as well as their newsletter. And I would encourage you to also follow the Project on Workforce at Harvard, who produces some amazing work. And one of the things I also think about is there's workforce development, which people need to stay on top of, but also follow what's happening within industry. So whether it's, you know, I watch Bloomberg Technology every day, which you can watch on YouTube for free, but it's knowing what's happening within that industry. And by the way, if you listen to a lot of those companies, the NVIDIAs, the Intels, the Apples of the world, you will hear one of their big concerns for their growth is where will the workers come from to build the new applications, the new factories, so on and so forth. And so I also encourage people who are doing this, don't just stay on top of the field of workforce development, which is critical. Stay on top of the industries that you're looking to serve because in the end, if you're not serving a market need, you're not serving. You're kind of building bridges to nowhere for people and we can't afford that.

Julian: Wow, I feel like I really hate to cut this off because this is just like amazing, amazing framing, information, practical steps, good examples. Thank you so, so much, Chike, for taking the time with us. And hopefully this is the beginning of a conversation for the three of us as well.

Chike: Thank you, thank you so much for having me. And again, thank you for having this platform for people to have these types of conversations. I am a frequent listener now and I look forward to more.

Kaitlin: Thanks so much, Chike, for your time. Thank you. You appreciate it. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Workforces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Work Forces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.