Believing in Yourself

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E7 – Frank Britt

Kelly: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Bailey. Each week, I talk with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, where they develop those skills, and their exciting innovations in the world of skills-based hiring and learning. Come learn what skills help you live your best life.

This week I’m joined by Frank Britt. Hi Frank, thank you so much for being here. I want to give a little bit of a backstory on Frank before we go ahead and jump in. Frank is the Chief Executive Officer of Penn Foster Education Group, which is a leading talent development provider focused on creating economic mobility by upskilling adult learners.

He is also an Operating Advisor at Bain Capital and is a former executive in residence at the investment firm. Previously, he also served as the [00:01:00] CEO of, was it prime med- I don’t want to say that wrong.

Frank: Primary Care Medicine.

Kelly: Perfect. Which is the largest primary care medical education company in the world focused on frontline medical practitioners. He also brings 20 years of experience helping grow companies in technology and consumer goods industries through senior level positions at IBM, Mainspring and Ascenture. Wow Frank, really amazing work that you’ve been doing here. And thank you again for joining us today.

Frank: Thanks again for having me.

Kelly: So Frank is joining us from Boston, I’m in New Jersey. Frank, tell us first off, how is everything going with you?

Frank: Well, I mean, things turned upside down for all of us and everyone’s doing the best they can to navigate and be empathetic to the realities that none of us planned, but we’re living through.

But there is a plan that we have to make happen and all of us are doing our very best. [00:02:00] On a personal level, my family’s safe in Boston and trying to find their new rhythm, like the rest of us. Then at the commercial level, in the context of Penn Foster, this has been a moment of actually a remarkably positive transition for the company.

And we can talk a little bit more about how we faded the larger landscape for employment, but suffice it to say that the Penn Foster story and value and kind of positioning that large is very well timed for a lot of the challenges the economy has particularly. So the workforce development and opportunities.

Kelly: It definitely is. And I would love to get into that, but before we do, why don’t you share a little bit about your story, your journey, what led you to be the chief executive officer here at Penn Foster?

Frank: I think my story begins as it often does with folks back when I was a teenager, I grew up in a very diverse community outside of the Bronx, New York and as is true, unfortunately and fortunately, even for today, I didn’t really have much [00:03:00] perspective as what would be the right path forward.

How to build the best choices and didn’t always have the navigational support that perhaps in retrospect would have been helpful. I struggled to connect education. I struggled to figure out what a career even meant.

And what does it ultimately mean to build the kind of life that we all want to build? Each of us, I think, at least many of us that were fortunate enough, I know I was, they encounter a person that says to you, I believe in you and it’s often parents. But it’s often folks are outside of your immediate family who say you have more to offer the world and you have more opportunity to change the world than you might fully realize.

In our case, my family, particularly my siblings and I, there was an older gentleman in our building who said, “I see potential in you. I just need you to, to think differently about yourself and reframe the possibilities and expand your ambition.” And ultimately he said, “you need to have higher standards.

You need to have higher standards for yourself. And that self expectations will kind of define your future.” We can unpack that if you’re interested, but the general notion is that [00:04:00] standards are something that are intrinsic and teachable. And the teachable part was his emphasis, which is that you can actually set high standards for yourself and hang out with people that have high standards for themselves.

And it’s very contagious. And he had a very extensive narrative about, low standards catch on like wildfire and so do high standards. And that if you find people with high standards, there’s a positive serendipity and you will get pulled up through the vortex. And I’ve sort of tried to use that as one of my first principles for now, 30 some odd years.

And it’s worked pretty well.

Kelly: That’s amazing advice to be given at I’m assuming such a young teenage age. Is there something in that advice as it was given to you? Just to unpack that a little bit, like you said, I mean, that is something that to me is such an important piece of what you end up turning into as you grow older.

So is there something in that advice that he gave you that really helped you turn and shift the corner somehow on how you planned [00:05:00] out your life?

Frank: Yeah, I think it did actually. Thank you for asking that question. There’s this notion that people who are older always give to younger people, that there’s a career plan.

And I think most people who’ve had successful careers will tell you there wasn’t really a plan, but what there often are, are first principles. The first principal that he advocated for was putting yourself in boundary conditions and to the extent you can convince people to give you the hardest job that you can possibly handle.

And if you can do the hardest job, you will likely be uncomfortable for a longer amount of time, but in so doing, you will grow faster and so seek out boundary conditions to help you grow asymmetrical. You help accelerate your rate of learning and be compelled to adapt quickly. And so my first principle and career path, if you look in retrospect, it appears there was some element of jumping around, but if you really get to the core of the narrative, it’s I tried to put myself in the most difficult environment I could to grow asymmetrically.

Some folks say, [00:06:00] they want to be the CEO of something. I never had any aspiration to be the CEO. In fact, I never had met a CEO, but what I did know is that if I put myself in a hard environment, I would grow faster and that cross training would yield more opportunities. And at the core was about building trust.

Trust is the most important thing at the early part of your career, and it’s certainly the most important thing at the senior levels of your career where you’re the steward of capital and stewards of other people’s careers, and obviously commitments to the students and declines science. So this idea of building trust and doing it with authenticity, with high standards, and putting yourself in boundary conditions.

That’s the alchemy that I tried to use to figure out what I should be doing in my life. And we’ll talk more about how that connects to Penn Foster, but the general arc of the narrative is we’re all building our career stories and our life stories. And in every good story, there’s a moment where there’s a change in the plan and how you respond to that change is what changes the story and changes the character.

[00:07:00] And I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of opportunities to be changed and transformed and it’s worked out very well.

Kelly: So can you give us a quick synopsis of what led you here to the point of being at Penn Foster? Just so we can understand maybe a little bit about these changes that occurred to you over that timeframe.

Frank: I think a lot of folks in life struggle certainly in the current context, maybe you can relate to this as well. You have this strong desire to help make the world a better place, but you have a tremendous amount of personal commitments that are very important to family, to children, to parents and alike.

And my problem was it always felt like a zero sum game and that if I did philanthropic work, I was spending less time with my family. And if I spent more time with my family, I couldn’t do philanthropic work. So I had been fortunate enough to earn an opportunity to work at Bain Capital in their venture capital group.

And I was exposed to this organization, which I had not been familiar with called Penn Foster, and Penn [00:08:00] Foster seemed to me at least to be a place where I might be able to connect the two. And then if by doing a better job professionally, and in my commercial roles, I could actually help more people.

And then if I expended more effort and it was more capable of delivering performance, which in our case means academic outcomes and financial results, if I could do that I could actually drive an impact on my social goals. And so what I found so compelling about Penn Foster was this idea that you could essentially help people craft their stories in a different way and in so doing, I could evolve my own story.

And not have as zero-sum game model, but have it be a force multiplier that the better I got and the more I grew and the more great people that I was able to bring to our cause, the more impact we would have on the outside world with our social impact and our academic impacts for students and outcomes and employment.

And it just felt like the kind of place that at scale, could really do some transformative work. And in the process, obviously I would be transformed in [00:09:00] kind.

Kelly: Yes. I love how you call it the zero sum game. I think a lot of parents can, that really resonates with us or anyone who has all of the multiple facets of life as they are, if it involves parenting or not.

But that concept that you can take all of those things and combine them to one. I really think that I’m just going to touch on that for a moment, because, as someone who, it’s interesting when you think about it, but I just love the way you said it. It really resonated with me personally.

I felt the same way in, the work that I do as well as like, how can we, before it was, “let me do this one volunteer thing and help at a soup kitchen” which I still try to do, right. But how can you scale that in a way? And that concept in a way where, there are things you can bring your kids to and there’s things you can’t.

So how can you make that all a part of your life? I just love how you kind of sum that all up into one beautiful little packet for us there.

Frank: I do think people though, [00:10:00] have this interesting problem that I believe on the one hand proximity matters. And certainly in this climate, people can be intellectually supportive of things that are going on in the world that need to change.

And that’s a great thing, but proximity is the difference. Then you have to be close enough to the problem to actually affect it. And just being intellectually supportive of something, is a step in the right direction, but isn’t sufficient. And I think that even we’re going to folks who work in social impact organizations is and fosters a social enterprise.

At the end of the day, we are helping change the arc of the story for people’s lives and giving them economic mobility opportunities. You still have to stay true to getting close enough to the actual altitude of the problem to actually feel the problem. Otherwise it’s just an intellectual experience.

And what we’ve tried to do at Penn Foster is at the executive level down to the folks who are obviously encountering students every hour of the day, we try to hold ourselves accountable to staying proximate to the problem, because if you do [00:11:00] that, you have both the intellectual aspects of how do you serve people and deliver more value.

But there’s also the humanistic level. And I think you need both the left brain, the right brain aspects of it to make it as authentic as it should be. And you ultimately make better choices that are obviously in favor of the learner.

Kelly: Right. So true. Now, do you feel like this is, this kind of occurred to me just here, as you were saying, that was, do you feel that you have some sort of personal, I often I find that most people, when they go into social impact work, it tends to be something that was a challenge for them at some point in their life that they’re trying to solve. Because they feel it, they’re involved in it. Like you said, that proximity, they are involved in a much deeper way because it’s either happened to them personally or people right around them or in the environment that they were in.

Do you find that that happened a little bit for you with how you found this focus at Penn Foster? Something here in the past for you that you had that same [00:12:00] feeling as well?

Frank: Yes. I would not have used these words naturally back in the day as they say, but I think that it’s self-evident unfortunately, even to the present that talent is equally distributed and opportunity is not.

And in my community, I wouldn’t say it was a high risk community, but it was also not one where people set their ambitions to change the world. That really wasn’t part of the conversation. And I see so many young people today and for them and middle-aged people too, who can have such an outsized influence on our future, but don’t always understand what the pathways are.

Don’t always have the navigational support they need in their life and they’re stuck for the wrong reasons. And I’m really preoccupied with this idea of how do you elevate people’s opportunities and unlock their potential? Because I think the power of example is the thing that changes the world and it starts within a family unit.

There’s pathologies and families that have served them well, and there are pathologies and families that have not. And one individual in any single family can [00:13:00] break and change and re constitute what that path is. And when they do that, they become the power of examples in their extended friend network and then in their community.

And then over time at large. So the key to transformation, and again, some of the larger societal issues in our country today, certainly play right to this as well. There’s plenty of top-down work to be done to rethink policy and legislation and allocation of resources and alike. The perhaps more profound opportunity is for individuals of all types and sizes.

And all geographies to essentially just stop, step up and step out and really lean in on making change. And if that happens at scale, kind of the bottoms up, the bottoms up will always be in the long run the top down. And so what we’re trying to do at our institution, what appeals to me, at a very visceral level at Penn Foster, is we’re trying to help create more opportunities for more people to be the power of examples in their communities.

And then drive that amplification effect at scale. And when that [00:14:00] happens over hundreds of thousands of people over many years, you start to see an important conversation changer and ultimately a lot of really good things that come that you couldn’t really do individually. But at an aggregate level can really become quite significant.

Kelly: That’s amazing. I really love the concept of doing this from that bottom up, because the more people I find, especially like we were just describing, when something just like that experience that happened to you with that gentleman in your building, as you were growing up, he gave you that wonderful advice.

That’s sort of the same way for people. So the more that we can empower them, to really be able to act in a different way, the more they can pass that on. And the more that that can affect some real amazing scale change. So before we jump into more about Penn Foster, because I really want to dig into that. I am just super curious, a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about in your journey here to me lend towards what I would refer to as maybe, a growth mindset skillset, or resiliency type [00:15:00] skills. I’m wondering what skills you feel are, do you find that it’s those, or are there other skills that you think really made you successful in life?

Frank: Well, first of all, the premise of your question is that I’m very successful, which I appreciate.

I’d certainly argue I’m a work in process, but I’ve come a fair distance in a relatively short amount of time. I think everybody in the room has genius. It’s just a question of trying to unlock what it is. Genius comes in many forms, the one that the society tends to reward and amplify is mental genius, which is very important, but arguably not the most important thing.

There’s obviously the emotional intelligence, which is a central. There’s a physical intelligence that some great athletes have that they’re just able to do things that none of us could really do. There’s a level of what you might call spiritual intelligence, which is a person who sees the world in a wider lens in themselves.

And then I think finally [00:16:00] there’s an intelligence having to do with connecting dots, that they can just see that the relationship between things. And I think my premise is everybody has genius in them, and the work that we do over our lifetime is to figure out what is that unique genius that you and I have that I can do uniquely well compared to other people.

And we probably all have three or four different examples of that in the long run. So I think we’re all in search of trying to figure out what that genius is and how can we have the highest relative impact for the time we’re here. In my case, I think that what I’ve tried to rely on consistently are good habits.

I don’t think that change happened in a big transformative way, although often looks that way in retrospect. It’s really about being very mindful and very preoccupied with small habits that have a force multiplier dynamic. And so from the very, very early stages of being a late teenager, when I realized there might be more for my life, if I did some different kinds of things, I’ve always been preoccupied with the self development and the [00:17:00] habit forming kind of activities.

And I’ve tried to inculcate that into my life. Not in a way that is a naturally rigid, it doesn’t allow for certain deputy and all the other exogenous factors to state my future, but I’m very focused on good habits are a force multiplier in the same way that we’ve seen in our lives. Bad habits become a force multiplier, but I think that’s the first thing.

I think the second thing is that if you see trust as the currency that you’re trying to build in relationships, the most junior person in a company is given an opportunity to do something that’s arguably not that significant. It may be sitting big to them, but their real goal was to do a good job and build trust that they can earn further responsibility.

And that narrative continues. And I think trust starts with not being preoccupied with what you’re doing for yourself, but being preoccupied with how what you’re doing is going to help somebody else. And if you spend more time worrying about the other people and less time worrying about yourself, it’s amazing.

The kind of amplification [00:18:00] that drives in terms of not just success and outcomes, but trust-building and ultimately opportunity. And I think that if you combine your habits, self-discipline, self-awareness self-development theme, coupled with serve others first and see what happens, if you just come to the world with those two, as your book ends, it’s amazing the kinds of things that can happen in a person who’s quite an ordinary, but ends up doing some fairly significant thing, just because those two principles just stand the test of time.

Kelly: They really do so well. Let’s, let’s remind the audience that it’s really these habits that build success over time. Not something that anyone else looking into someone’s life might think like, whoa, there’s no exact prescription for that. Everyone is different, right? You want to leave those moments for life to happen. And for the wind to take you where it does, if you will.

Also, that concept of building trust and sort of looking at the needs of others maybe ahead of the needs of [00:19:00] yourself. If you sort of expand that viewpoint, not only always looking internally, externally, you feel like those two things coupled together really do help people move the needle forward for themselves.

Frank: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, that’s true. It’s by the way, a lot easier said than done.

And it applies in both your personal relationships of trying to serve others first, all the way to your commercial relationship. People often say, well, I’m different at home. My perspective on that is, you kind of are who you are and it manifests itself a little differently in environments, but the same principles apply.

So if you want to be a better husband, a better parent, a better sibling. Serve others first. And by the way, if you apply those same principles to be a better boss, be a better leader, it turns out to be the same playbook.

Kelly: It’s it’s very true, actually. So would you say that these types of skills that we’ve just discussed are things that you’ve learned in any, was that through [00:20:00] life, through that advice you had as a young teenager, was that through formal education, a combination?

Frank: My family it makes light of this sometimes, I think that reading is the thing that changes people as much as anything, obviously connecting with humans is this tied for first, solid suits overrated in the long run. But I think that being preoccupied and I’ve always thought about there’s no need to reinvent things that others have lived through. Why not borrow what they’ve done and try to apply it to yourself?

So I think if I were to offer a young person or even frankly, a middle-aged person advice. When in doubt, go read an autobiography about somebody. It doesn’t even matter who the subject is. It could be George Washington. It could be Gandhi. It could be a great athlete.

I think you learn from the journeys of others and I’ve tried to read quite a few [00:21:00] books over the years. It’s one of my favorite pass times and borrow ever so small components of what their narratives were and apply it to myself. I use this story theme a lot because I think it applies to both us as individuals.

And then as I’ve mentioned Penn Foster, there is this arc to your narrative that you’re building and you might’ve all borrow from other people’s narratives along the way. So you can make sure that the way your story it turns out is to be one that is right for you. I think ultimately everyone has a choice.

You can either fill in the guest book or the history book, and I think the history book is what we all want to be a part of. And to do that, you might as well a borrow from other people who’ve walked, maybe not in the identical steps, but in their own steps that you can borrow from. And I think reading tends to be a very important.

The other one, as we mentioned at the opening remarks here, is you are a byproduct of the people you spend time with. I always say to my children, if you want to see what you’re going to be, don’t just look in the mirror, look to the [00:22:00] left and look to the right there’s the folks that you hang around with are likely to have an outsized influence on how you think about yourself, your habits, your priorities.

And that’s not to say that you should isolate yourself to a limited number of people. I think we’re better through diversity and a more heterogeneous life experience at the end of the day though, there’s a limited number of people who are going to really have a disproportionate influence on you.

You better be very thoughtful about who those folks are, because you will become very much an element of who they are. And that can be a really good thing. It can also turn out not to be good and you get to decide that and need to be very intentional about it.

Kelly: It’s so true. And I love reading stories too, just as a way, at any point in our life.

And I agree with you, it could be a young person all the way through, we always are trying to figure out that, that gift. I love the way that you put it with that gift. That is not something that you automatically, at least not for many of us, you don’t automatically just know what that is straight out of the gate.

And a lot of times through your life that [00:23:00] changes and adjusts depending on kind of what windows or doors you decided to go through. The conflict of the story is not only for you to kind of pull from, but also as you try to start to figure out what are the things that really light your fire.

That’s what I find with these stories that are so interesting. Anytime that there’s something, for me right now, social impact is a really big deal. So that’s why I picked up Gandhi because I was like, okay, the person who I know in history has done such amazing things. I want to hear what he had to say about this and what challenges and struggles he had to overcome. It sort of helps you look back on how you might be approaching things in your own life, which I think is just in addition to reading for the another purpose and I just love the advice that you’re giving here.

I think it’s really going to be tangible for a lot of other people out there in their own lives. Again, no matter what stage. We’re all transforming throughout our life all the time, because when you’re not transforming, you’re just stagnant. [00:24:00] Right?

Frank: I think you need both self discipline and self leadership. And I don’t think those are the same things. Self-discipline is about yourself, and self-leadership is about how you engage the world and help elevate other people’s aspirations. And it’s one of these little secrets that no one talks about that the more people you help, the more it helps you. And we tend to be preoccupied with our own situations and our own kind of mental models, which by the way, has tremendous merit, but in and of itself is not sufficient to really drive the kind of impact that I think honestly we all crave.

That’s part of why this environment today and the work from home model is so problematic because human beings are biologically engineered for connection. And we intrinsically want to be connected to other people in our lives. And when you’re physically disconnected over extended amounts of time, it starts to mess with the subconscious and conscious aspects of who we are as people.

And we feel uncertainty and we can’t even explain it. We just, [00:25:00] it’s palpable though. That’s where I think being even more mindful and more purposeful about connecting with people and making that a habit, back to our theme, is essential because it’s very easy to regress to the mean of isolation and isolation is not a healthy thing.

It’s not the way we were set up as a species, and it’s not one that I think ultimately allows us to be our best self. And so I think all of us working harder to build connection explicitly and purposefully, is essential to making sure that we all get through this moment in a way that we’re mentally healthy, as well as obviously physically healthy and do the work we need to do from a commercial perspective as well.

Kelly: It’s so true. And honestly, that’s why I started this podcast. So through when this first started, I’m someone who travels a lot normally, but I also do zoom. I work from home. So zoom is sort of my lifeline out to the world. As this started happening, I noticed some of the people that I would chat with through zoom, there [00:26:00] were certain ones that were more depressed, I’ll just be honest, than others. And those people that were more depressed were the people that were doing like internal work. They didn’t have a lot of zoom calls like I had, they weren’t the people that were out there always traveling, talking to people.

 And every day, at the end of my day, I know the way that I felt after I get to have conversations with people like you all the time. And when I tell you at the end of my day, I come out of my office room and I’m like, “Ooh, this was a great day.” And my kids are used to hearing me say that all the time. And I’m like, “you won’t believe who I talked to today and what I learned.”

And so I realized for me, this is exactly why this all occurred because I was thinking, what if more people could hear these amazing conversations that can be had, but how could that not only raise awareness for all of this amazing work that we’re doing, but how could that help? And that was, that was the reason that this podcast actually exists now.

So I really extremely [00:27:00] appreciate the way that you’ve described that. And I think more people, hopefully this and other things will make them realize that it’s just stay connected. That’s really what it’s about.

Frank: Well, I think you’re becoming a power of example, and I think that much like we see with our students, the biggest crisis most people have is a crisis of confidence.

Not a crisis of competence. Competence is solvable with effort but confidence is something that is intrinsic to who you are. And we all need people to remind us that we are awesome because we are, and that we all have an opportunity and a responsibility to help a lot more people. And it starts with helping yourself.

You cannot be your best self if you don’t focus on making sure that you’re bringing your A game. I think one of the things is often lost, particularly with younger people, is that a lot of times the work is hard. I mean, you think about Olympic athletes, which are obviously extraordinary means, if you were to ask Michael Phelps or some of the top gymnast of the world, is it fun to go to practice on a regular basis?

The answer is [00:28:00] absolutely not. It’s not fun to spend eight hours a day in a pool, six days a week, but what they’re in search of as a higher experience that comes only from and intrinsically with, doing something that’s amazing. And they are aspiring to do something amazing. I think all of us, if we’re willing to do the work can do amazing things.

But unfortunately there aren’t a lot of shortcuts. And I think sometimes the stories we read and stories we tell ourselves is one that shortcuts are possible. That’s not been my experience that the divine river to being your higher self comes from grinding. And it doesn’t mean you should only grind, if you can go up the ladder sometimes in the life, in the shoots and ladder game, that’s okay too.

But you have to put in the time and the effort to become your best self, and there aren’t a lot of shortcuts. And whether that’s reading, whether that’s fitness, and whether that’s helping other people, it does just ultimately take a real commitment of effort and it’s not supposed to be fun, but what is fun is the endorphins and the effects you can see on [00:29:00] the outside world.

That’s what really, at least for me, motivates me going on a day in and day out basis. I think the last thing I would say is, I think if you’re motivated by learning, not by saying it’s the work, it’s the learning. If you’re motivated intrinsic by learning, then you can always find another gear if you need to. Just like great athletes find another gear to keep pushing through physical.

I think most of us can find another gear, but you have to be willing to live with that discomfort because on the other side of discomfort comes insight and opportunity.

Kelly: It’s going back to what the gentleman in your building in the Bronx has said to you, which was, if you go and you shoot for the hardest job that you can handle in this time, you’re going to get there so much faster. And I’m so glad, I find a lot of times these sports analogies are very helpful because most people either have played sports or are really sports fans. And it’s the same things, the same way, when you think of it in practicing for a sport, [00:30:00] a lot of people understand that, but it’s the same way in life.

It’s not any different. There’s not some magic formula. I mean, none of this. The one thing I would add, because I was talking about this with my daughter this morning, I have one daughter that loves school, loves to learn, and I have another daughter who she says I don’t love school, I don’t love to learn, but let me tell you, she is determined to train the dog that we adopted last summer.

And she is on YouTube all day long. So if you find that thing that lights your fire and you’re curious to figure it out and you know that at first, everyone realized, even when I started this Frank and I talked about this, when I first started, I mean, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing.

I mean for all I know I could have been awful, but I was like, I’m going to figure it out. It’s totally fine. And I was curious enough to do that. And that’s what I said to my daughter this morning. I was like, you might not like learning [00:31:00] Spanish, like your sister Kennedy, but you love learning how to train a dog.

So find the thing that you love that makes you passionate. And that process still hard, still going to have to put those habits in the work in, but it’s a lot less awful when you love it.

Frank: That’s exactly right.

Kelly: So I want to shift gears a little bit here, although not really, because it’s all connected, just to the world, but we talk a lot about these sort of innovations in the world of skill-based hiring and learning. But I know Penn Foster and your work there, you’re involved in some really amazing initiatives.

We’ve got this scenario happening right now with COVID. However, I mean, I don’t even know the latest count of people on unemployment. Is it still 40 million? I feel like-

Frank: I know. Fortunately it’s down, but that the numbers are in some respects underreported because there’s a lot of people who are still employed with less cumulative hours.

And it also differs vastly [00:32:00] by obviously industry. In the case of hospitality, retail, not including grocery and entertainment you’ve seen 20 or 30 million people be displaced. I mean, there’s carnage wherever you turn in the marketplace, and I think that everybody in the society, whether it be employers, individuals, government are all trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do about it.

It’s a scale of a problem that we’ve never really encountered before. Fortunately from Penn Foster’s perspective, we’re well situated to try to play at least some role, in helping to remediate at least part of the challenge.

Kelly: Yeah. Well, you guys are involved in one of the initiatives that just recently has been publicized.

I think it’s the Skill Up Coalition. I know that there’s so many amazing things we could talk about, but just because that’s prevalent to what’s happening today, I’d love to hear a little bit more about that and your involvement in that work as well.

Frank: Well, if you just take a little bit of a step back the [00:33:00] education system in the United States, at least from our vantage point, has K-12 on one end and higher education on the other. And there’s this very large opaque market in the middle, which we refer to as workforce development. Which would be anyone who did or did not finish a high school experience, up through micro-credentialing, certificate programs, and associate degrees.

It turns out that that cohort of the workforce is about half the workers in the United States, it’s about 140 or 50 million workers in the countries you know, half of them, the department of labor would call middle-skilled. Which is less a commentary in their skills and more commentary on their academic pedigree, which is not four year degree. So in the not four year degree world, and then in some cases, even in the four year degree world, there’s a system that’s set up that was originally based on the idea of geography.

Which is why there are workforce boards and why are there community colleges and so on. And what’s happened, obviously both in the larger context of society, and most recently with COVID is, while geography always matters, where you are [00:34:00] physically in New Jersey and Boston matters. That’s not a rate limiting factor to whether you decide to go pursue a program because where you are physically doesn’t have any connection to where the program could be delivered given the digital world we’re a part of.

The coalition that is being built that you’re mentioning, is a response to the reality that there isn’t really an integrated place for consumers, adult workers if you will, to find the services they need in a holistic environment. You’d say, well, yes, there are universities, there are training companies, there are career schools, that is all true. But it’s a very, very fragmented market.

There isn’t any single provider in the market for workforce development that even has really 1% market share. That’s pretty unusual for a market that is so large and so complex and so vital to the competitiveness of the country.

And so this coalition has come together that said, there are lots of good options, lots of good options for consumers. We’re not presuming that one is right for [00:35:00] you, but we’re suggesting that if you were able to bring them all together under one roof, not in ownership sense, but in terms of an integrated experience, it would provide the consumers who so desperately need to be re-skilled, that workers need to be re-skilled, a single place to go and learn about their opportunities.

And then ultimately make whatever the right choices for their career path in this organization, which is virtual in large, is designed to be a coalition of like-minded people, friends of the common mission of helping to elevate and create opportunities for people who have been displaced or dislocated, who are working adults and all the solutions and providers share a common commitment, kind of a common DNA if you will, to help people find their best future paths and then do so in a way that works for their lives and works for their career aspirations.

Kelly: That’s lovely. Now I have a question because you and I do this work a lot, but this is something that always comes up for me. And maybe the question’s a little bit out there, but I find that there’s so many [00:36:00] similar initiatives going on.

Is this just because of the natural fragmentation of this environment that we’re experiencing all of this? It feels like we keep running into, and I’m so happy for it so it’s not even that I mean this negatively, I’m just curious your thoughts on why you think there are so many sort of parallel and similar initiatives going on?

Frank: Well, I think there’s a negative and a positive framing on that. The negative framing is because the current system isn’t set up to respond to the problem. And so as a result of that, people are really trying to figure out what can we do to change how the model works? I’m fascinated that particularly in a political context, that the general default posture is to use the current system and just invest more money in the current system.

And while the current system has a lot of merit and certainly should continue to receive plenty of investment, the idea that the current system in and of itself would provide enough agility, [00:37:00] flexibility, and optionality to serve the 21st century workforce strikes me as dubious. So the response that you’re hearing and seeing are individual organizations saying, can we drive a bigger impact?

Can we have a larger footprint if we do it as a group? In some industries and in this industry, I don’t think will necessarily lend itself to this, do you see a lot of companies physically come together as one big company, right? But that’s certainly not likely to happen in the higher education and workforce development system.

It’s just too fragmented. There’s too many diverse needs. Just in the middle skilled labor market alone, there’s at least 1200 different occupations. 1200 occupations across 75 million people who are all different life stages, who all have different learning proclivities. It becomes such a complicated problem.

The idea that one or two firms could solve all the problems is completely impractical. So the remedy is, don’t just rely on the current system because it’s not designed for all the challenges, although it still has an important role to play. [00:38:00] And then see if you can bring together like-minded people who have complimentary orientations, but a common DNA of trying to uplift and empower people to take better control of their economic mobility.

So all these coalitions that you’re starting to see emerge are all market responses to a challenge and a size of a problem that really is uncommon. Normally in a recessionary setting and the data shows this people go back to school.

Historically, education has been a countercyclical category, for sure. However, in this environment, which unique is, the magnitude of the size of the problem is so immense. At the peak of the great recession you had 10 or 11% unemployment across the country. Now you’ve got 20% unemployment in some geographies that could be 25 or 30.

Then you add other segments, urban, suburban, certain industries, certain ethnicities, the challenges immense. And it’s not, I think that size of a problem that’s well appreciated. The United States for [00:39:00] higher education has about 18 million people annually who go to school. That’s everyone from the freshmen who started at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, all the way through to the person who’s in a PhD program.

You’re talking about 18 million people in a steady state environment. Well, you have literally millions, millions of people who need to be re-skilled, in the middle-skill workforce that historically hasn’t really had the right optionality, at least not for all people. And it just seems so self-evident that you’re going to have to have coalitions.

Coalitions are an alternative to buying companies and putting them all together. It’s a much more flexible way to do it. And frankly, a much more realistic way to do it. Given the, the acute problems we have.

Kelly: That does make sense. Now, do you find, and again, this is maybe an out there question, but again, just out of curiosity, do you find that the coalitions are to support that infrastructure or are they also [00:40:00] hoping to maybe help some innovation in that infrastructure or both?

I mean, it could be both, I guess.

Frank: I would say the emphasis is on innovation. I think ultimately we often in the education economy, talk about the problem from the inside out, from the supplier out. And I think the, perhaps the alternative way to look at it is consumers demand choice. Consumers are have the lowest level of trust they’ve ever had in their history regarding large scale institutions.

With the exception of the Department of Defense, whether it be government banks, pharmaceutical companies, consumers have never had, citizens have never had less trust in how the institutions that were designed to serve and help us work. And I don’t say that as a political comment. It’s just what the pure research shows.

If you look at innovation in many categories, from food delivery, to eyeglasses with Warby Parker to banking solutions like Chime, what you see as a new [00:41:00] class of organizations and new portfolio of brands is emerging trying to respond to the new needs of consumers. And what’s happening in education is finally we’re starting to get, we’re still a ways away, but we’re starting to get a much more consumer centric orientation to how we think about education and learning as a consumer product.

What do we know about consumer products in all categories for furniture to clothing, to food, it stands for quality. It’s about affordability and convenience. And in your family, you make different trade-offs between quality, affordability and convenience, depending on the consumer products category you’re purchasing.

Historically education, for some reason that I don’t really fully appreciate, has been somewhat immune from the normal dynamics of consumer products. And what we’re saying as part of these coalitions, is that education is a consumer product, which it is the consumer, being the worker who needs to re-skilled. You need to come at it with that orientation.

And that includes new brands that [00:42:00] have new promises to stand for, new kinds of ideals that ultimately serve the learner. The traditional system, there are many innovative organizations who are aspiring to do that, but there aren’t enough. And so we see the future is one where the best of the traditional firms emerge and you’ve called and become their new best selves.

And there’s the new class of providers that respond to consumer needs and establish new brands that appeal better to the choices and the priorities that consumers have in the 21st century.

Kelly: I love that you put it that way and it’s funny as you were saying this again, the connection was made when I was reading your bio.

I remember you having experience in consumer goods industries, and this is exactly the same way that I have thought of education since I was in college, because I really was super attentive to the return on my investment. I worked myself through college and when you have that experience and you’re really trying to figure out how you’re going to make ends meet, I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have the choices that I needed at the time.[00:43:00]

Just because I was a traditional student, didn’t mean that I was a traditional student. I actually acted more like a non-traditional student, like a regular adult student. I just happened to also be 18, but I needed those choices. And so I love that. And now I’m just thinking of all of this amazing, we tend to find in this world of education and the world of policy and politics again, not even getting there, just government related education related work that it tends to not mirror the way that we think of the world of business. And the way that we’re sort of like we’re serving people. Which is fantastic. It’s just, we’re not thinking with their needs in mind first, maybe historically.

Frank: Well, what are the questions I was wanting to ask? And the answer is a little tongue in cheek, but I think it’s designed to make a point. I was asked if I were the head of the department of education for an hour and I could change one thing. What would I change? And my answer was I would institute net promoter score [00:44:00] as a new metric that’s added to how the education economy is measured.

Because the current system has this, I don’t know what you’d call it, parental orientation, where the entities that govern and manage and curate education, assume that the consumer isn’t able to make their own best choices. Because there have been bad actors over the years that have done things that have absolutely put some consumers at risk, but those are reports the stories of the bad apples and most apples aren’t bad.

So the reason why I think net promoter score would be a far more relevant metric is your definition of value or your specific choices you make, you have a quality idea as an enumerator and a price as your denominator. And your notion of value for what you need is different from what I need, which is different than what your daughter needs and it’s different than the people down the street.

And so since I can’t know that how you define value, any more than you can know [00:45:00] what I would define as value, the true north should be are you satisfied with what you got out of the experience? And if you got out of that experience what you needed then it was a successful outcome. And I think what’s missing in the education conversation is, there never a discussion about the net promoter score equivalent of, are the workers that are going back and being re-skilled, are they satisfied with the value they got? And the current system says you don’t know that. So I will establish scorecards to measure whether the providers are providing you, what you need.

My point is that’s okay.

Kelly: Completely. Did you graduate? Did you get a job? Like it’s all very-

Frank: Yes. And so I just think that the good thing about COVID, and there’s not a lot of good things about COVID, but one of the good things about COVID is as they say, recessions and pandemics accelerate what would have happened inevitably and makes it happen faster.

And I think what’s happening and the coalitions are an example of a manifestation of it is, the idea that consumer [00:46:00] choice should drive the way the education learning economy works, particularly for adults, is becoming the new normal. And whether it be net promoter scores, coalitions, and a variety of other innovations, there’s this very dramatic tectonic plate shift happening where the traditional system is sort of being dislodged, not broken up.

There’s a lot of good things about it, for sure, but just enough that there’s enough of a window that new providers can step in and at least show by example what they can do. And many of the folks, not all of them, but many of the folks in those coalitions are examples of next-generation organizations that are trying to offer better consumer choice in a complimentary way to the traditional system.

Kelly: Yeah. Maybe we can think of it like you described earlier, which was if we hang out with people that are just slightly… right. Maybe that’s how we look at what’s happening right now. Let’s bring in those people that have just sort of moved ahead, just so, and we’ll take from them what works [00:47:00] for us. This is in an organizational sense, as opposed to the people sense.

Frank: Standards are contagious and positive serendipity is a real thing.

Kelly: Exactly. Well, we’re coming up close to the end of our time here, Frank. So I thought I would just ask one last question for you. Is there anything else in your work, in your life, that you’d like to leave as your parting words with us today?

Frank: Well, I think that we all should take time to reflect on the people who have helped us get to where we are. We have this preoccupation in our society to think about what we need to do next. And that I think is a prudent thing to have as part of your daily agenda. But I think we don’t spend enough time and I know I’m guilty of this, of pressing pause and just thinking about the people who may not have been quite as profound influence as Joe in my building, but nonetheless at a moment when they didn’t need to, they stepped in and helped encourage me.

And I think the statement of, I believe in you, as cliche as that is, [00:48:00] really is the difference because I think even the most successful executives I know, still suffer from some wealth or imposter syndrome and some level of confidence issues.

And I think confidence and helping people feel better about themselves, is really the biggest gift and the most important gift you can give a person. Everybody’s got demons. Everyone has fears, it could be health. It could be economic, could be career, could be their kids, could be a variety of things. And I think that everybody needs a little bit of boost.

And I would just encourage everybody to just take a few minutes again today and say, is there one person I can reach out to, I haven’t talked to in awhile who could just use a “you’re doing okay, you’re doing great. And I believe in you.” And I think if you do that and we all do that, it could really make a big difference.

One of the thing we always talk about our company is, we have about 750 employees and that if every single person just made one extra phone call today to thank a colleague, encourage a colleague or support a colleague. It’s so significant. It’s really an unmatched kind [00:49:00] of influence. And if that becomes your habit, if the habit is to have a positive deviance towards other people to encourage other people, that may be the most important type of virus to have, which is the virus of thinking about people and giving them the benefit of the doubt and encourage them to be their best selves.

Not with judgment. But with the presumption of competence, confidence, and a belief in them. And that’s kind of how you make really powerful organizations become even more impactful.

Kelly: I absolutely love that. Yesterday, my girls were, we have two women in the neighborhood that live on their own that are over 90.

They don’t live together, two separate houses. And one of them in particular was feeling very lonely, very depressed, and she’s immune compromised for many reasons beyond her age. So she can’t even come out to go for a walk. And it’s been like a hundred degrees here. So my girls and another neighbor girl went with chalk to her driveway and they drew all of the, I mean, I went and I took pictures [00:50:00] because I’m almost going to cry.

Just the things that they wrote for her. Like today’s a great day. You’re a special person. You’re amazing. All of these things over her entire driveway and we have long driveways. It was just so heartfelt and they did it completely innocently, just, they heard that she was sad and they went and did that.

So I’m going to add to your parting thought as I tear up a little bit, add to your parting thought here, that we’re going to give everybody a challenge today. We’re connected to our phones. Okay. We all get that. Set an alarm in your phone, you can actually name an alarm. You can ask Siri, you don’t have to have any special skills with your phone to do this.

You can ask Siri to set an alarm for you at one time every day, where you just reach out to someone and say, you’re amazing. You’re awesome. Whatever it is that you want to do, one positive little statement, let’s all do that and see if we can make some major change in this world. So Frank, [00:51:00] thank you so much, Frank.

I have just enjoyed every single thing today. I mean, it’s like we have talked before, but this level of understanding of your background and how this is, it’s just honestly, I’m getting teary-eyed from more than one reasons. I guess I’m just like one of these people that tends to get, I’m finding that I’m doing that more and more often these podcasts, but I really do appreciate you joining us today and sharing with us and all of this amazing work that you’re doing.

For all of you out there that are interested in maybe following along with Frank’s work, he is available on LinkedIn and Twitter at Frank Britt. You can also find him on his website, frankbritt.com. I know a lot of his writing is available on there and let us know if there’s anything else that people should look out for there on your website, Frank.

Frank: I think that’ll cover it then obviously, Penn Foster, I play a small part in the larger agenda of the organization. And Penn Foster is putting out lots of important information regarding how to help more people take control of their futures. We have a [00:52:00] lot of work ahead, but we’ve had some impact, but our best days are clearly ahead.

Kelly: Definitely.

Pennfoster.edu. Lots of great information. They have all the social media channels as well. I follow them. Fantastic information that comes out, please do keep up with them. And thank you all for listening in today to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating, review, download, subscribe, you know, all the things. If you’d like to follow me, it’s available on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. I’m actually also on Twitter. Although I don’t play as much on there as I do on LinkedIn, but it’s at Kelly R. Bailey.

And besides that, we just hope you all have a great day, go and enjoy and please take that challenge. We really do want you to. Let’s change the world. Have a great day.