InStride Podcast Episode

Stephanie, Vice President of Education Partnerships at InStride, discusses the shifting skills employers are looking for due to digital transformation. Learners are seeking affordable credentials, making education and career preparation more complex. Corporations see the value in partnering with academic institutions but struggle to do it at scale. The trend of recredentialing or in-skilling is growing, removing the requirement for degrees and focusing on skills. However, determining the necessary skills and providing them to employees is a challenge. Industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and distribution face workforce shortages and skills gaps. Successful approaches involve showing learners pathways and stacking different learning options for career mobility. Affordability is also a concern with numerous alternative training providers. Navigating these choices requires careful exploration and consideration. Hello, thank you so much, Stephanie, for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Well, we're thrilled to chat with you and tap into some of your expertise. You know, McKinsey and company and many others have started publishing research that the digital transformation has really shifted skills that employers are looking for when they're hiring. And learners are increasingly seeking out alternative pathways to affordable credentials. So navigating education, career preparation, skills training, career advancement, it's gotten more and more complex for today's learners. So I'm really excited to cover this topic with you today to help provide some insights on how to navigate this complexity for employers, for learners, for education providers. So thank you again for helping us dive in. The first topic I really wanna cover is on workforce demand trends. And so in your role as Vice President of Education Partnerships at InStride, what trends are you seeing in workforce demand and in the skills required for current and emerging jobs? I think I would start by overall saying that corporations 100% see the value in partnering with academic institutions. They always have, that's not a new trend. They just don't know how to do it and how to do it at scale. And they feel like they have to do it alone. And so I think when you talk about the complexity of navigating skills attainment and educational attainment and career mobility, it all feels hard. And corporations want to help employees do it and academic partners wanna help learners do it. And nobody seems to know how to work together to do it. And part of that challenge is because there's not a single academic institution that can meet the needs of enterprise at scale. There's just not. And so I say that to say that the trend that we're seeing, I feel like I'm reading an article about it every week, is this idea of recredentialing or what we at InStride call in-skilling. It's this idea of removing the requirement to reach certain levels that requires a degree. So for example, we've done this in-skilling work with our client Medtronic, which is a medical device company. And they had a long standing rule that you had to have a degree to be a manager. And that led to a very homogenized management layer that wasn't reflective of the diversity of the corporation itself. And so you keep reading these articles that say like, remove the requirement to have a degree to get the job or remove the requirement to have a degree to have the mobility. But then what, right? I feel like they write about it like it's a single decision that a corporation can just make. Do away with the degree requirement. Well, then what happens? And so some of the work that needs to be done, again, we call this work in-skilling. It allows corporations to remove the degree requirements from a job, but you have to then do the work to determine the skills necessary to perform the role. So you have to crosswalk the skills and competencies with the job description to figure out, okay, if you don't need a degree, what do you need? And then that's not enough because then how do you serve up those skills and competencies to employees so that they can attain them to then attain the mobility, right? I think that that's the trend. It's a trend that we love to see because we do feel like degree requirements hold folks back, but it's not just a decision that you make to like have a degree or not have a degree. You have to then do the work to break down the skills and competencies, find ways to make those skills and competencies available for employees. And then academic partners can come in or university partners can come in and say, now, how do we acknowledge those skills and competencies in the form of credit for prior learning? How do we award the currency of higher ed, which is the credit hour, for the work that folks have done to attain the skills and competencies? I love what you're describing about breaking it down to the building blocks that most apply in today's workforce, and then almost restacking them in a way that still leads to that mobility and that education continuum, but in a more meaningful and intentional way versus a pre-packaged way that maybe historically served many needs, but is not responsive to the way the workforce is evolved with so much transformation. What industries, for example, are really experiencing the highest workforce shortage and or largest skills gaps? All industries are struggling to find and retain talent, but the reasons are different. One example would be healthcare, where there's an aging workforce, where we know there's a set of, let's say, registered nurses who are planning to retire in the next five to 10 years. That's a different challenge than the manufacturing industry, where jobs are changing rapidly and jobs that exist today won't exist tomorrow. When we look at the manufacturing industry as well, there's not an influx of people coming into these roles. Then you look at distribution and you think about the drivers who miraculously make the Amazon packages show up at your house every day. Wait, that can't just be me, right? Those distribution drivers can drive anywhere. They can drive for Amazon, they can drive for FedEx, they can drive for UPS, they can drive for the post office or the food delivery services. And so the competition to find these employees is just fierce. Those are all different challenges, but I don't think there's an industry out there that goes, all of these great, really skilled people, I just don't know what to do with them all. Well, and that very much lends itself to how we think about preparing the skilled workforce and how we think about advising learners along this trajectory to find the meaningful credentials they need to both enter and continue to advance. As you said earlier, the elimination of a certain credential as a way to enter and advance in a career needs to be translated into different kind of methods of validating skills, but could still be laid out in a way that's relatively easy for learners to see the progression and the pathway and the ability to kind of grow and continue to acquire the skills needed in certain disciplines. Have you witnessed successful approaches to addressing these gaps and helping to define these pathways for learners to both enter and advance in career pathways? I think for as long as I've been in the higher ed system, including when I was a learner myself, there's been this age old debate of, well, don't study that, study this. You'll make more money if you study this versus that, right? I am a proud English major who other than speaking and writing in English as part of my job, can't really tie that degree to my career path or my career trajectory. And when you start to think about a working adult student, it gets even harder. They've tried this before and not been successful. They might be the first in their family. They might be first generation learner. And then there's also the lack of confidence. So an adult learner has an even harder time figuring out like, A, how do I find the motivation to do this? And how do I possibly know what to study? And so I think when we're dealing with the working adult population, we have to think about it in two buckets. One is the learner who is very motivated, who says, if you give me the opportunity to finish my degree and the corporation will fund it, I will do it. I will pick something, I will study it, and I will do well, and I will achieve that academic credential. There's another learner who's not gonna raise their hand, even if their employer is willing to pay for their tuition. But if you ask them if they wanted a better paying job or career mobility or a promotion, they would raise their hand. And so that's where I think you have to do the work as an employer to show learners pathways. And so here at InStride, we have career education paths. We're actually really proud because this was recognized by Fast Company last year as one of the world changing ideas. And it's this idea of showing a learner how they can stack together different learning options to get to a career mobility that they want. And so maybe I start out today, I'm working in IT technical support and I'm a level one specialist. And I'm handling your tech support calls and I'm closing tickets and I'm delighting customers. But how do I get to be a cybersecurity employee on the cybersecurity team? That's likely a higher paying job. It's likely a step up from where I'm at. I have the technical acumen, but I need more. And so we're able to, again, that crosswalking of skills and competencies to then say, if you take this pathway, here's how you can enter the cybersecurity space. And then here's how you can grow in that cybersecurity space to the higher paying, larger set of responsibilities within that space. And so I think it's, again, employers don't have to do it alone. This is where academic partners and university partners are great at understanding skills and competencies and learning outcomes and corporations might not be. And so we just have to get together at the table and say, what are the goals? What are the roles? What are the roles that you need tomorrow? And how do we start training folks today to do those roles tomorrow? Well, and another component, I think, in all of these decisions for an employee or a learner is affordability. And it's become increasingly challenging to afford various academic options. And with all these alternative training providers and alternative credentialing programs, the space has gotten very full of options. And so do you have advice for a learner who is trying to navigate what types of providers or training solutions may or may not be a good fit for participating as they're trying to explore all of the affordable or competing or alternative choices that continue to emerge? Yeah, it's a jungle out there. It really is. There are so many options. But when we think about building an ecosystem of learning, I think it requires us to think about learning, whether that's a degree from a university, an employer-driven training, non-credit learning-like skills, language learning, boot camps. We need to think of them as complementary to each other, not competitive. I call it an ecosystem of and, where I can attend a boot camp and I can get a certificate and I can get a degree. And I know that because I've done that. I have an undergraduate degree. I have a graduate degree. I've done field-based learning. I've done non-credit learning. I'm currently in a program at NCI that's an executive ed program. And not one of those solutions on its own would have given me what I needed to have the career that I've had so far. And nothing that I've taken to date is going to get me where I need to be next year or five years from now. And so we have to think of it as an ecosystem of and. But in order to do that, universities need to find a way to recognize credit for something that didn't happen inside a university, whether that's employer-provided training or a boot camp or non-credit learning. How do we give learners who have accumulated a lot of skills and competencies along the way, how do we give them credit for that and help them to achieve the goal of a degree if they are degree aspirational and that is one of their goals? And so in your role at InStride and working to facilitate bridges between employers and learners and education providers, do you have any examples that would be a good opportunity for other education providers to consider as kind of a model for them to emulate? Absolutely. First, it starts with access. And I would love to see the day where we're not turning working learners away from universities because they don't have the academic credentials to get in. Another wishlist item is workforce-friendly programs. Again, proud English major. I love the liberal arts education and the problem-solving skills that you can learn from that. But let's look at what the workforce needs and let's build programming around it. Even better, let's find a way to build that programming so that it's stackable, so that learners have shorter finish lines along the way to keep them motivated. Maybe they earn a certificate that stacks into, a larger certificate that stacks into a degree. The other thing that I think is really important is no tiering. I think sometimes there's this thought that the university degree programs need to be of the highest quality with the exceptional outcomes, but the non-credit stuff doesn't need to be. I think we need to focus and root in quality and outcomes for all of these learning options, whether that's language learning skills, high school completion, it needs to be rooted in top quality. And universities shouldn't be saying, a learner at my institution can have a very different experience based on what they're studying or their modality of studying. If they're going on campus versus online, the quality or the outcomes are different. I don't think that's fair to a learner. So how can we help to facilitate better bridges between the education and career advancement partners to really help facilitate this lifelong learning journey? I think companies are learning that they need to have a strategic approach to how they educate and scale their workforce. There are companies today that are investing millions of dollars in let's say tuition reimbursement programs with the best of intentions to help their learners, but tuition reimbursement has access and equity issues. And the learners that would benefit the most are unable to use the benefit because they can't come up with the money to pay out of pocket and then wait 16 weeks till the semester's over to be reimbursed. So one, I think companies need to think more strategically about how they can spend that money into programs that will actually grow their workforce and get the career mobility that their employees are looking for and also demonstrate ROI. In some cases, companies can't even tell you how many of their employees are taking advantage of tuition reimbursement, what they're studying and what the success rate of the program is. So I think being more strategic about designing a benefit that A, employees can actually use all of them, not just the ones that can afford to pay upfront and wait to be reimbursed, but also designing a program that's got some strategic goals that can actually, and then making sure employees are aware of the benefit. I've had that experience with an employee where I know there's a benefit and I kind of know how it works, but I don't know where to go or who to ask for more information. So I think that companies need to be more strategic about building a program that everyone can use, making sure that all employees are aware of it and know how to use it and measuring the ROI behind it. I would say that they don't have to do that alone. There are companies and Stride would be one of them that can help do this work to make sure that the program is successful. So now from the perspective of working with the educational institutions that are part of a broad network who's looking to better figure out how to collaborate, to collaborate with one another, to collaborate with industry, to collaborate with other industry workforce partners who are helping to develop relevant and workforce aligned programming. What advice do you have to really promote and encourage this kind of collaboration? As I said at the beginning of our conversation, I think the intention is good on both sides. Corporations see the value in academic partnerships and relationships. Academic partnerships see the value in serving corporations. I think a lot of it on both sides, there's likely red tape and political challenges. And so my advice to both the corporate partners and the academic partners is to get out of your own way, cut through the red tape and the bureaucracy, admit that you need help and you need a partner to help you do that work. And then really center everything that you're doing and building around the learner. Well, and I think that is beautifully said. At the end of the day, we're all really working hard to make sure that learner experience is one that is meaningful, that leads to employability and advancement, social mobility, lifelong success. And so I am grateful for your engagement with us on this topic, for the work you're doing at InStride to promote the success of these learners and their lifelong learning journey, and really proud to be a partner with you in this space. So thank you so much for joining us today.