Building Skills Into Education To Develop A Workforce

Episode Transcript

SB S3 E4 – Ramona Schindelheim

. [00:00:00] You’re listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I’m Kelly Ryan Bailey and this season we’re talking all about The Great Resignation. The global pandemic disrupted so much for so many, and one of the largest effects has been on where, when, why, and how we make a living. We’re taking a look at why people have been shifting jobs, paths, and careers at such an accelerated rate and how leaders from different industries are navigating this challenging time. Hope you enjoy this episode.

Kelly: Hey skills nerds, with me today is Ramona Schindelheim. Ramona is the Editor in Chief at Working Nation, the executive producer and host of the Work in Progress podcast and an award winning journalist.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Ramona.

Ramona: Thank you, Kelly. Really a pleasure to be here.

Kelly: Oh, my gosh. I have been really looking forward to our [00:01:00] conversation because you bring this multi lens to view on the topic of work in education. And I know some people, hopefully everyone that’s listening is familiar with Working Nation or has listened to your podcast. But if they haven’t, your focus is really telling stories about solutions to the skills gap.

So I have a feeling that this is going to be a really outstanding conversation.

Ramona: I hope I don’t disappoint.

Kelly: I cannot imagine. Well, let’s go ahead and kick this off. Ramona, I’d love to hear what led you to Working Nation and why are you so interested in this?

Ramona: Ah, well, I’ve been a journalist for a number of decades now, and I’ve covered everything from local news to business news, investigative news. I’ve kind of gone the gamut of journalism but I’ve always had this interest in the topic of workforce and workforce development. And I think it comes out of my own personal experience.

[00:02:00] I grew up in a family that was lower middle class, my mom worked as a waitress, my dad worked in a factory. And none of us really knew the pathway to a career, a good paying job, where skills were involved. I think most of the members of my family kind of just fell into a job. And I’ve always been kind of interested in the conversation people have around the dinner table or they have in their community on how do you build a workforce?

How do you build skills into education? So people do have these opportunities, and how do they know about them? So that’s almost a natural pathway that took me decades to get to, but a natural pathway to get to where I am now, where I am telling stories about that very subject. How do people learn what they need to learn to have a good job or a good career?

Kelly: I love how you [00:03:00] described that because we often, at least the general public I would say, we often think about ourselves as there’s this career ladder that we’re climbing and it’s sort of the straight line and how you describe this, in my mind I’m envisioning the twisting and turning of your career path to get to where you were always meant to be because of this passion.

And hopefully that is a good lesson for our listeners.

Ramona: I’ve always tried to tell stories that have a personal angle to them. And I, again, even without thinking about it, when I worked in local news or I worked in business news, even when I was covering stock markets, et cetera. I wanted to know what it was about that industry or that story that gave people purpose in work.

And how did they get there? So, there’s a lot of the twists and turns, but I do believe I was supposed to be here.

Kelly: That’s so interesting. As I was doing a bit of research ahead of us coming together, I came across, [00:04:00] I think it might be your latest article or at least the one that I saw, which was titled ‘Five Reasons Adults Aren’t Getting Hired’. And I noticed that your number one reason, I’m sure you remember this, was lack of skills. And it just caught me that what are the skills that we’re lacking? And maybe tell us a little bit about your thoughts behind that.

Ramona: Yeah, that article I wrote for Next Avenue. And I’m kind of passionate about this too, which is, I think older workers gain skills just like all of us as we go through our career. We learn on the job.

But sometimes if we are in a job for a long time, we are forgotten. We are kind of part of that workforce or that company where they say, oh, that person does this. And they don’t think about upskilling them or re-skilling them, or teaching them new skills. So then when something comes along like the pandemic [00:05:00] or any other economic shock, these are the people who might lose their jobs just as we all did.

And we know like at one point 20 million people were laid off or fired, the businesses went out. Some of them got hired back, but the point of the story is these older workers aren’t being hired back as quickly because they were that forgotten workforce. They were never skilled up. They were never taught some of the newer technology that they might need on top of their other skills. They already had the knowledge, institutional knowledge.

They had an experience, so that when hiring started they would be right there in line with everyone else. So that’s the lack of skills part. It’s not people are incapable of learning. Sometimes they haven’t been given the chance.

Just lack of awareness and that’s on the part of their employers, and sometimes [00:06:00] themselves. You can’t live in this world without knowing technology now. Every job has become tech focused or tech enabled, even if you’re working at a retail store, inventory is done with a handheld scanner, right. And we all know how to do that. We all know how to learn that, but sometimes the effort is not made to teach it to us.

Kelly: No, that makes sense. And the one other thing I was thinking about as you were describing that, if you find yourself, let’s say we’re one of those people that might be in that position, what can they do if they feel like they haven’t had the opportunity? How do they go out and find that? Can they have conversations with their employer?

Ramona: I think they should. I think if the employer’s not raising the issue, I think they should. They should watch how their industry is changing and say, what do I need to advance? This is happening at all age [00:07:00] levels. I just interviewed this guy who’s in his mid to late thirties who has been doing the same job. He was a logistics router for a big company, and he’d done it for I think he said 10 years, and he’d keep applying for jobs cause he wanted to advance and they would say to him, well, you don’t have X, X, and X skills.

And in particular they were skills on sales that he could learn through Salesforce. And he didn’t think about how he could acquire those while still working at the company. He thought about dropping out of school and going to get a master’s, and adding a lot of expense with a family.

But eventually he figured it out that he could take a course that would teach him a specific language that he needed, and he got the promotion. So it took him a while to get there and his employer actually helped him in the [00:08:00] end, but he didn’t read the room for like 10 years even though he kept getting denied a promotion. So he finally figured it out.

So I think it’s important that whatever industry you’re in, whatever job you are in, you need to be aware of how it’s changing. And I use an example, again I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, I started out typing on a manual typewriter when I started my job as a journalist. And over the course of years, the technology had changed. We started working on computers instead of the teletype you used to see in a movie where they’d rip off the wires and run into the next room. It was coming into your computer, just like we all get our info now. I do my own podcast, I edit it sometimes myself. I’ve learned the technology to create graphics.

I learned some simple coding to code things on the back end of the website at Working Nation.[00:09:00] These are all things that I looked around me and I saw how it was changing and we become a one man band, one woman band, sometimes in this industry. And while I don’t like to see an industry shrink, I look at it as opportunity.

There’s probably more people doing journalism in some form or telling stories in some form, then there’s ever been. And a lot of it is people who are self-employed, entrepreneurial. Lucky for some of them, they worked for big companies and probably make pretty good salaries. But it’s all about trying to read the room, again as I say it, and make sure you have the skills you need to compete with other people.

But I’m happy to compete with anybody, 20 years younger than me, 30 years younger than me. And then I’m going to leave it at that number I think.[00:10:00]

Kelly: To me, what you’re describing is sort of like taking agency over your own career. And it is so easy for us to just be comfortable and not kind of reach outside of our comfort zones. And I love that you’ve also pointed out some of the ways that you’ve gone about doing that.

And it sounds like as you described them, maybe those weren’t in the case of the example you shared with that gentleman, maybe your situations didn’t sound like they were necessarily a formal course as you needed to learn things. As you went along, how did you pick those up?

Ramona: I did it a combination of experience on the job. So I would observe what somebody else was doing and ask them how to do it, ask them to show me how to do it. I did take some courses though on editing, online free courses. When I started working at Working Nation five years ago, I was a writer journalist for them.

And then [00:11:00] when I became the editor in chief, I had to understand the backend. We use WordPress. I had to understand the back end because I work at an organization, we’re a small nonprofit that tells stories, and we all do multiple jobs. So I had to learn how to do it. Some of it was trial and error.

And then I did go online. LinkedIn has courses on all of this. I went online and took at least a course to understand things. And that was part of my natural curiosity. Some of the things I learned on a job 10 years ago I was able to apply today. And you just build on it. And I actually want to point out, this isn’t new.

If you think about this, we have been doing this our entire lives, our parents’ lives. My father worked at a plant. He was a tool and die cutter. He started out sweeping the floor there and they gave him a chance to work on the [00:12:00] machinery.

He learned as the technology changed. We’re talking about, he was working in the sixties and seventies, and as the technology changed on how you cut a gear, he learned it. So he learned it on the job. And there was, I think once or twice, he actually went somewhere and was trained to work on the next machine. And he became a supervisor.

He became the shop steward. He taught other people how to do it. So there’s a lot to be said about learning skills on the job. Opportunity at Work, if you’re familiar with them, big nonprofit, they talk about stars. Those are people who are skilled through alternative routes. And those are on the job work experiences or in the military, you pick up skills in a lot of different ways.

I urge, I always urge employers to think about that. A degree is not the only [00:13:00] way you measure a person’s success. I’m a college senior, after all these years I never finished school. I learned how to write and produce on the job. So again, I’ve been doing it for many years. It was being done before I was even born. People learn on the job.

So I think that’s a very important part of skills and upskilling is, what can you learn on the job? Who can you learn it from? And sometimes you do need that little extra outside help.

Kelly: Definitely. Now, as you were describing this I was like, this is just such great information for someone who is going through their career, and they may be either in their case, moving up, pivoting, transitioning. There’s all different ways to turn, nowadays. But I think of from the employer to. What are some of the things you’ve seen from your vantage point, from an employer perspective, that are helpful [00:14:00] to start to see their true employee as what they can bring to the table? Especially these skills that you described that are gained maybe through work experience, as opposed to formal education.

Ramona: We talk a lot about technology changing. And when we say that, what it’s really changing is the way we work. So for a company that maybe is making aircraft engines, that technology is becoming more efficient, more energy efficient, easier to produce in some ways, and then more technically complicated as they go.

 Using that as an example, they need to make sure they have the people who can program, who can build, who can repair, that type of technology that is at the core of their business. What I’ve seen that’s been the most [00:15:00] effective is companies that recognize how they are changing their business and look internally and give people opportunities to move up. So instead of saying, you don’t know how to do this because it used to be done analog, now it’s digital.

Let me teach you how to do that. It’s been a proven fact that keeping retaining workers is much more cost-effective than hiring and going through the hiring process. Putting out the ad, then training the people that they’re bringing in. So it’s more cost-effective. It creates a more skilled workforce because they’re bringing all that knowledge that they had before into it, all the institutional knowledge about using, again an engine, how that works? What has worked in the past?

How do we solve this problem? Oh, now here’s the new technology. How do we get [00:16:00] it to do what we need it to do? So they get that internal training and that’s very effective. AT&T very famously like five or six years ago, they offered every single one of their 200,000 employees the opportunity to do that upskills from analog to digital.

A lot of people did it, and then they offered them free training through in person programs, online programs, certificates, working with coworkers who already knew some of the skills. That was a very smart way to do it. So then they have both the benefit of the experienced workforce and they all have these new skills.

A lot of companies are now doing what Walmart, Target, Chipotle, I mean there’s a whole list, Waste Management, are doing. Bringing in Guild Education and other companies like that, Coursera, [00:17:00] to offer training to their workforce. Some of it is things that will help them grow within the company, and some of them are actually gives them skills so they can go out and find even better jobs.

That’s a smart move on the part of an employer. Again for them, it’s an education benefit to their existing employees. They’re going to get some really, really good employees out of that. And then they’re going to put some really skilled people out into the workforce to work other places as well. So when you talk about what are employers doing and why should they do it?

I think those models are really effective and they’re good for the workforce. It’s not just about the company. It’s good for the people already employed by them because they’re lifting them up with better skills. And a lot of times that means better pay

Kelly: I love that you’ve pointed out the advantages, not only for the [00:18:00] employers in this scenario, but also workers in this. And I’m sure that I’m going to butcher this quote, but I was just remembering something that you see quoted by Richard Branson often, which is if you don’t train them well, someone else will hire them or something to that effect.

It is quite interesting. I also think of from an employer perspective, someone hiring workers, when you think about the skills that those employees might have like you described, a lot of times the one thing that you can’t see as an employer is all of the other things that are not on the job that could be so transferable.

And I think of you describing your breadth of history prior to being where you are here today and how I can only imagine how that has shaped you. And I think of maybe there’s this tech employee that’s an amazing musician, there’s all sorts of different things that someone can bring to the table. And I think a lot of the work that’s done in [00:19:00] this area tends to lean on in the hiring and upskilling internally at an organization on to technology that can tell us about our employees and what they need. In the people you’ve talked with, how much of this feels like we need to replace tech to help us versus people, we need to come together and figure this out. And maybe analog is the wrong way to describe that, but I almost lean back on your words because that is really something that you have to do as opposed to filter in with tech.

Ramona: Tech has one skill, right? What you technically need to do for your job is definitely one skill. People refer to the other skills, as soft skills. Don’t you want to have on your team someone who has experienced a problem before has a really great brain and knows how to figure it out? Or they have a bigger interest, as you said, this whole idea that [00:20:00] maybe somebody is a fabulous musician and because of it, their brain works a little differently and they can bring a different creativity to the workforce.

 There’s this conversation I had with Joe Fuller at Harvard Business School. They published a piece called Hidden Workers. And one of the things he said in it was they, he was like the lead author and there were a couple others, but one of the things he told me was that AI is screening out great talent. So now we’re talking about technology screening people out.

So there’s these AI programs that you can program, if you’re a hiring manager or a company, that says I only want people with a four year degree. I only want people who know how to build with Java script. You can limit it so you don’t have to [00:21:00] interview 500 people. Right? You could interview five people who might have those skills. But you are missing so many great people.

You’re missing somebody who doesn’t know Java, but maybe they know another script, another computer language. Or you’re missing someone who doesn’t know any of that technology and doesn’t have a degree, but for the last 15 years, they’ve been the manager at a factory where they’ve run 150 people, they’ve solved every problem that ever came about, they’re experts at logistics, and they might be that right person for your company.

I think the lack of face-to-face conversations with people and learning about them, you miss a lot. I always feel like the best jobs I’ve ever gotten are the ones where I’ve had conversations with people, and sometimes we hit a mutually shared love of something and they could see how my [00:22:00] brain worked and I could see how their brain worked.

There’s a human part of the workforce that we can’t forget. To that same idea, not all of us have that gift of gab in a conversation, for a job interview. Some of us, I can’t say some of us because I do like to talk, but there are many people out there who are shyer and it takes a while for you to get to know them.

So as a hiring manager, as an employer, I do think that you need to dig a little deeper into that, what makes them tick as a human being. They may not be a great conversationalist, but they may just have so much depth of knowledge and understanding of something that can be a benefit to you that you really, you’re missing out if you don’t go through that conversation.

Kelly: It is so true. Well, first of all, you’ve like gone right into an area that I’ve been super, super focused on for so many years because the bias in artificial intelligence has been [00:23:00] something that is long withstanding. And I am honored to be with Joe Fuller on the board of an organization that is actually attempting to remedy this scenario.

Ramona: Oh!

Kelly: You just went into an area that I’m like, Oh, yeah! And then, that concept of having that discussion, when you describe that about you having conversations, I was thinking, I don’t even recall the last time I submitted a resume through a system that would have read it by artificial intelligence.

Quite frankly, I think I probably would have never gotten hired that way because to try to describe, and I’m sure all these things in something that is so short form and then to not know if that connection exists with that person. That is something to me that I feel like is a missing part that we don’t talk about enough in hiring.

Ramona: I will say, I already said it, I am a [00:24:00] senior in college technically. I dropped out when I was in my senior year at DePaul University because I got a job working in a newsroom as a writer. So any resume I put out there, if somebody screening for people who don’t have a college degree, I’m out of the pile right away. I think I bring a lot to the table and I think I have with all the experience that I’ve done, the jobs I’ve done, interviewing. I mean, I’ve run newsrooms, I know how to do these things, but it’s not reflected in a degree.

And there was a time I can think about, 10 years into my career, I probably thought, oh, maybe I’ll go back and get my degree. And never had time, never had the money. And now I look at it and go, it doesn’t really matter. But luckily I have found people who will engage with me based on my experience. And I do think that’s missing so much. There are so [00:25:00] many people out there who really do have those skills. As you talk about, it’s all about skills.

It is all about skills and you need to take the time as a hiring manager, an employer, a supervisor, to really understand what a person is capable of.

Kelly: And what you described in yourself, I’m hearing this like eagerness to learn. And when I think back on some of the stories you shared with us today, you’ve heard a thread right. With your father going out there and figuring this out and then teaching other people. You’ve heard the story with the thirty year old gentlemen that you interviewed.

To me, there is something about, it’s a two-sided piece, right? Someone could be the most eager to learn and figure things out and get excited about the work that they’re doing, but if they’re not feeling valued, if they don’t have the connection within that employer, most often there’s something there that fades. And, [00:26:00] I think it’s just such a shame for employers and potential folks that could be working with them. But that piece that you described, that connection.

Ramona: I will always value the first person in my professional career, I’ll name him by name. I’ve lost track of him, but John Holtman, he was the News Director at WBBM Radio, hired me as a phone answerer to start with, gave me an opportunity to do a summer writing fill in vacation relief after six months when I was there, he gave me another friend of mine, Deidre White, who I’m still friends with.

And she went on to a lovely career in journalism as well. Gave us both the opportunity. We both failed miserably. Those three months were torture, but we learned a lot of things and John gave us both the opportunity to do it again because he saw something in us. He saw value in us [00:27:00] and we learned. Both of us spent, we talk about this actually a lot of times after all these years, we both spent like the next couple of months, really looking. Instead of wallowing in what we did bad is like, what can we do better? And we both got hired as writers and producers within the next three to four months, and the rest is history.

But that was someone taking the time to get to know us and to see what our potential was and encouraging it, and I always have valued that. And as a manager, that is my mantra, is to mentor, is to see what somebody is capable of. I won’t use this person’s name, but I had a young woman worked for me at CNBC, and she really screwed something up. I mean, really badly. She was a news associate, screwed it up. She came to me crying and said she was going to quit.

And I [00:28:00] said, don’t quit. That’s one mistake you made. We’ll show you how not to make that again. And what else can we do to lift your skills up? And I didn’t use the word skills I don’t think, because that’s a word that I didn’t use until now, maybe in the last five years, but she is now has a great career.

She was so close to quitting. I remembered what somebody did for me and I have encouraged her and I’ve encouraged anybody who’s ever worked for me to do the same for other people. So you really need to invest in the people who work for you and not just say, oh, that’s all they’re capable of. You need to help them find sometimes what they’re capable of or listen to them when they say that they can do it and give them the opportunity to do it.

Kelly: I think that’s the quote right there. That says it all to me, thank you for that. Well, thank John, first of [00:29:00] all wherever you are, John, my goodness. And, thank you for then taking that and paying it forward. I hope we can all hear this and take that into our experiences. Just lovely.

 We’re coming close to the end of our time here, Ramona, and I’ve got one last question for you. We’ve talked a little bit about, and you did mention that this wasn’t just happening now because of COVID. But everything that you’ve been seeing at least over the last couple of years, I’m sure there’s been a few things that have been, maybe it was already here and has been accelerated.

It’s not new. But what are the things, if you could say looking forward now, what are you expecting in the next few years in relation to hiring and education more broadly?

Ramona: I think one of the things that I’m seeing is higher education somewhat reinventing itself, putting more focus on the outcome, the career. There’s a lot of competition now with higher [00:30:00] education. People, companies are saying, I don’t need you to have that degree. So I think higher education is thinking about how do we make sure that there is value at the end of four years?

Look, the time that I spent in school, I loved it. It was an eye opening experience exposing me to a world that I had not had. It’s a great time. 18 to 22, learning who you are, meeting new people, experiencing, experimenting on what you might want to do with your career. If you have the opportunity, not everybody has. Some people start out of high school.

Some people start in high school on the career path they want to. So not knocking higher ed at all, not knocking a two or four year school, but there needs to be this acknowledgement that there’s a lot of competition out there. And I think there is an [00:31:00] acknowledgement. So I think higher ed is looking at different ways to make sure you have actually some practical skills that can be used.

On the flip side of this, I’m seeing that apprenticeships where you learn and earn. So you can go and work to learn to be a coder and you get paid, you apprentice at something like IBM, but now they’re connecting the college credit to it. So when you do that, you are on the next step already to a degree, if you want one.

So both sides of that equation are looking at it. How can we change that? The other thing I would say is, lifelong learning, we didn’t use the phrase but that’s what it is. The whole model is gone, that idea that you go to high school, you earn a living and then you retire and that’s it.

We have been in this phase for a long time where we’re always learning and we need to learn because technology is [00:32:00] changing so quickly. I look at what we’re doing here, we’re doing a podcast over the internet. I can see you. You can see me. I can hear you. You can hear me and you’re recording it. That’s happening over computer and we’re doing it on our own. We don’t have some studio that we have to go into and learn how to do it. It’s a part of our lives. On a more broad basis, cell phones are a part of our lives. So we all learned how to use our cell phone.

We all learn how to use our laptop. We all learned how to bank over our phone. These things are a part of our lives, and they’re going to continue to be a part of our lives in the future. Probably almost every job you can think of, there’s going to be a digital aspect to it from plumbing, using handheld equipment to get a reading on the water and see if there’s a leak. Drones in agriculture, again, my dad worked in [00:33:00] manufacturing, his parents and my mother’s parents were both farmers in Arkansas and cotton farmers. So they’d have to take the tractor out, and to the back 40, they called it the back 40 acres.

Now you can fly a drone out there, they can drop down, pick up a soil sample and fly it back to you and then you can test it, right? Each industry is changing, so people have to be aware of it. You work in a retail store, you work at Walmart, you work in a little shop, you have an electric cash register and at the end you take credit cards.

I mean, all of this is part of our lives. So looking forward, I would say you have to be willing to learn some of those skills and on a bigger societal issue, we have to make sure that everybody has access. There is a big digital gap in this country, and it’s not in rural areas only. It’s in urban areas as well.

We [00:34:00] always think when people say digital divide, it’s the people who live out in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska, don’t have broadband. There is gaps in our big cities. People don’t have laptops that they need to apply for a job, take a course, do their homework. And we saw a lot of that during the pandemic when people had to go work from home.

So in the future, I see that has to be something that we look at as a society. We need to make sure that opportunity is accessible to everyone. If we don’t, we’re going to leave a lot of people behind and we can’t. We need everybody. We don’t have enough people to hire. Some of it is lack of skills. Some of it is lack of access. So we need to make sure that we give opportunity to everyone.

Kelly: That was just wonderful insights that you’ve shared with us as parting thoughts, Ramona, thank you, so much. And thank you so much for taking the time out to [00:35:00] share all of the views that you’ve learned over the years with us and just, I really enjoyed the conversation.

Ramona: Thank you, Kelly. It was great to be able to talk to you.

Kelly: Thank you. Well, you guys, if you are interested in keeping up with all that Ramona does, you can find her on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Her handle is @ramonawritesla and Working Nation is available at workingnation.com and on social via LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. I highly recommend, especially on these issues, keeping tabs there.

Thank you all for joining today and have a great day.

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