Communicating Your Skills

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E11 – Sharon Leu

Kelly: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey. Each week, I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, how they develop those skills, and their innovative approaches to improving skills-based hiring and learning around the world.

Come learn what skills help you live your best life. This week I’m joined by Sharon Leu. Sharon, thank you so much for being here.

Sharon: Thanks for having me.

Kelly: It looks so much sunnier there than it is right here right now. I’m a little jealous.

Sharon: Well, the sun comes with like 90 to a hundred degrees of weather, so I don’t know. It just ends up balancing out.

Kelly: True, and it is a hot summer. You guys, let me do a little introduction for Sharon. Sharon is the Senior Policy Advisor of Higher Education Innovation at [00:01:00] the US Department of Education. She leads the office of educational technology’s post-secondary education innovation initiatives that explore the complex ecosystem of lifelong life wide post-secondary learning.

And the opportunities technology provides to broaden across to education for all learners. Most recently, these initiatives focus on open education, credential, interoperability, and the education blockchains initiative. Sharon also works in offices across the government on projects that showcase promising practices in digital workforce development and building capacity for emerging technologies.

Prior to joining OET, Sharon oversaw the design and implementation of the Department of Labor’s $2 billion, I say tact grant program, but for those of you that are not familiar, it’s trade adjustment, assistance, community college and career training. And I don’t actually think I ever even knew what that acronym fully stood for, by the way.[00:02:00]

Sharon: No, it’s better that way.

Kelly: But it was the largest federal investment in post-secondary innovation and systematic infrastructure change. And from what I understand, you have been working in government for, is it over 10 years now, right Sharon?

Sharon: Yes. I’m a bureaucrat.

Kelly: Oh my gosh. I was going to say that’s pretty unusual.

Sharon: Yes.

Kelly: Amazing. Well, and Sharon also is an aspiring Park Ranger. For all of you that don’t even know what she’s wearing on her shirt right now, please explain Sharon, because we just talked about this.

Sharon: Well, I wanted to say thanks for letting me wear this. This is my junior ranger badge. This is from 2016 when they were having their a hundred year anniversary.

And so if anyone has kids, I do not have kids, but the junior ranger program is one of the best educational programs that the national park service runs. And essentially they have booklets at all of the national parks, and what you do is you take the booklet from the ranger and you do all the activities.

So you learn about nature [00:03:00] and animals and preserving the ecosystem and the environment, native cultures. There’s a lot of work that’s involved. Then you have to like swear a little oath to protect nature, and they let you wear the hat for a photo and they give you this little badge. So I love collecting these and no one takes me seriously initially, because they’re actually looking for my kids when I asked for the junior age.

And then they always like impose extra roles. Like I think if you’re like zero or if you’re like three to five, you only have to do like eight out of the 10 activities. They’re always like, you have to do the whole book. I’m like, fine. I’ll do the whole book. And so I collect a lot of these.

I have a spreadsheet. I don’t know the exact number. I think I have about 14 of them, probably more. I’m not going to mess up the internet connection here, but I have a spreadsheet where I tally all the parks I’ve been to with all the ones where I have ranger badges and the date that I got them.

Kelly: Do you have a list of like the ones that are on that are next to go to?

Sharon: Yeah. [00:04:00] Obviously, global pandemic has kind of messed up my plans for this year, but I really enjoy doing these activities. I like to show people this, because this is one of my, I think this was one of the great sadnesses in my life, is that of all of the places that I have ever applied to jobs at the National Park Service has rejected me the most times out of anybody.

But I keep trying, because I think it would be super fun to be a park ranger. Whenever I go to a park, I ask the park ranger how did you get your job? What is it that you do? How do I get your job? It’s really hard. And so I apply and I get rejected because on the list of knowledge, skills, and abilities, I don’t really have them.

 But what I want someone to do, and this is a challenge to all the badge designers and like credentialing platforms, is I want you to help me show my skills. Because I do all these booklets. I know a lot about indigenous peoples and leafs and animals, but none of that comes across to my LinkedIn profile because it all just shows things like she was an analyst and she writes regulations like, who [00:05:00] needs that in a park?

Nobody, but I have so many of these.

Kelly: You’re like “I’ve done the whole booklet!”

Sharon: Every time, every time I do the whole booklet. Hopefully one of your listeners will make me a way to actually define my skills so that I can actually find my dream job.

Kelly: Yes. And obviously something that we’re working on. If the federal government can say that they’re hiring based on skills, I feel like the parks can make that change too. And it just sounds super fun. I do have kids and I’m thinking that, oh my gosh, my kids would love to do something like that, especially my oldest. So I’m just really glad to know about this.

And I love that you’re beaming. So this is like for this wonderful story.

Sharon: Do you have a dog? Because they have these for dogs too, by the way.

Kelly: Yeah, we do have a dog, but our dog is not a super social dog. It’s more of a, I like my space and no other people and no dogs, so maybe better to take my kids.

[00:06:00] But Sharon, this is great because what I wanted to jump into first, which now we’ve learned a little bit about you is sort of what led you into this work? And obviously there’s this huge passion around determining like the skills that you’ve gained in all of these opportunities and how to portray those.

So I feel like that’s probably gotta be some of it, but I’d love to hear more about your story, all of this time you spent in the government space, but also in the space of sort of building out your career.

Sharon: The funny thing is that I work on a lot of projects that have the word career pathways in them, but honestly I really dislike that term because I’m actually not a person that has a very linear career path.

Whenever people say things like, “well, what do you want to be in five years?” I’m like, huh? I don’t know. Because five years ago, would I have thought that I’m still here even 10 years ago? Probably not.

So I started off, I studied molecular genetics in school, and I then went on to study econ.

And so not at all education policy or public administration or anything like that. I was [00:07:00] interested in, but a lot of the work that I did were focused on like cleaning data sets around various different things. So when I was studying molecular biology, it was genetics data. And then when I was in econ, it was development indicators and things like that.

And I needed a job. So I got a job doing data at the Department of Labor. So that is the way that I got into government – through the USA jobs website, which I know is pretty weird, but it actually works cause I have a job.

Kelly: That’s amazing. I love that it’s still around too.

Sharon: It is still around and people are working on it try to improve the way that government does hiring. But it is a really hard process. I think everyone wants that to be better. There was an executive order recently too, about how government should start thinking about skills-based hiring, which is also really encouraging.

And we just have, there’s a lot of rules that we have to work around. Probably not more or less than what everyone else deals with about labor and fairness and competition and all of that. So [00:08:00] it does tend to take a little bit of time. But my first job was involving data and looking at data and writing reports about it.

In 2009, it was right around when there was recovery because there was also an economic disaster. So a lot of the datasets that I worked on were around like the impact of trade on the US workforce and things related to that, and eventually got into regulations that were around like the data.

And then I realized that regulations are terrible because all you do is talk to lawyers all day, which by the way, if you’re listening and you’re a lawyer, I don’t implicitely dislike you, it’s just that I realized I don’t have the patience for it. And so that’s sort of a shift, right? To move from, being behind the monitor and looking at numbers to actually having to interact with humans, which I think was a skill that I didn’t necessarily have very well.

When they launched the tact program, they were looking for someone who sort of understood the mechanics of why trade adjustment assistance. For those of you who don’t know, trade adjustment assistance says as the economy shifts,[00:09:00] as products are excreated in foreign countries, or as skills are imported, or as things are imported and the domestic workforce loses out, then the government should step in and help the workers whose jobs are lost find new training.

So the TA program, the trade adjustment assistance program is actually for the longest time, was the Cadillac of retraining programs. Because not only did you get, if your job was trade impacted, if you worked for a company and they decided instead of manufacturing particular part in the US they would manufacture it overseas, then you could get benefits that included things like- you could get the equivalent of unemployment insurance while you were in school.

And while you were in that training program that the government paid for, you could also get additional benefits and it included things like an extension of health and a number of other things. So I think it was like the grandfather of the most comprehensive package you could get.

But it was difficult because it was [00:10:00] actually only for people whose jobs are impacted by trade. So when they expanded it to this grant program, it was really interesting. They needed someone to like actually administer the program, and so that was how I got into the world where I interact with humans and talk to people about how to develop programs and started the road to that.

Because we worked with so many community colleges, I think by the end of it over 60 or 70% of community colleges in the United States were my grantees at some point or the other. I think people thought I knew a little bit about education and so I ended up at the Department of Ed.

Kelly: I think you might have picked up a lot about education and I’m still floored that you felt like you didn’t have the people skills because knowing you today and how easy it is to talk to you, I just can’t imagine that.

Sharon: Well, I had a really interesting conversation.

This is a very pivotal conversation that I had in my life. It was probably the first time that I did anything that wasn’t like a recorded webinar that was, here are all the rules that [00:11:00] you have to follow to be like a responsible grantee. Someone had invited my boss’s boss to speak and to give a presentation and update at this meeting.

And nobody could go, because she couldn’t go. And then my supervisor, he couldn’t go. And so I’m sloppy thirds. I’m super nervous. So I type out like what I’m going to say. I’m only required to talk for 10 minutes. It’s an update, it has bullet points on all the data points of how many grants and the dollars spent.

It’s all the details that I care about from my spreadsheets that I had made. Then I was like, well, am I required to go to this networking happy hour? How many minutes am I required to be at this place? And I actually even asked my boss at the time, can I have a small stack of your business cards?

Because what’s going to happen is people are going to want to socialize and talk, and what I would love to do is give your business card out and say, the person you should talk to is my boss who manages all of this and he’s unable to be here today. You [00:12:00] should get in touch with him at a later time.

And I think he said something to me like, you can’t do that. And he said something that I still remember today, he was like, people like think the government is this like mysterious thing. They see the buildings. They’re frustrated when they’re at the DMV. And he was like, you should think about your role in the public as being two things you should be like, you should be knowledgeable about the subject area that you’re responsible for. You should be approachable.

And he’s like, you’re very knowledgeable. You’re not approachable all the time. And I was like, oh, ouch. So, and he was

Kelly: It always hurts when you first hear it, but you’ve remembered it now and it’s Sage advice.

Sharon: It is because it wasn’t like these are people that you’re going to invite to your home for your birthday party or anything.

These are relationships that the department needs to have in order to be more effective at serving the public. So you have to engage the public and you have to understand them and hear them and they have to feel like they can [00:13:00] come and talk to you. And I was like, oh, well, that’s really hard.

Kelly: But then you’ve got to flex your muscles on practicing that. And it sounds like you just had to do that right away at that networking event.

Sharon: I cheated. I looked down the list of who’s going to be there and I thought about like one thing that I would, I feel like I could talk about with all the people on the list.

Like it wasn’t a huge list or anything like that. This is an example of a skill I think that I didn’t naturally have, and I sort of cheated a lot of times, I love getting the who’s coming to a conference thing because it lists because then I can say I can mentally prepare myself.

I can be like, oh, Kelly’s going to be there, I’m going to ask her about what Emsi is up to because you all just published a report, so I want to know about that. And I’ll write myself notes and the first few times, at that meeting and then at probably every meeting that year, I actually brought a crib sheet with me and I [00:14:00] would say things, like if I would’ve met you that first year that I ever had to be in public, I would have been like, Kelly, you worked for Emsi.

And then I would look you up on my list and I would be like, oh, Kelly, I read this report and here’s my question for you. And it was so awkward and unnatural, but anyway, it’s a fantastic way.

Kelly: I actually really love that you’re sharing this because for people that just think, especially when anyone looks at maybe even sort of the platforms that we’re on now and they might come and see something that we speak at and they’re like, oh, wow.

Well, I’m going to share my thing to Sharon. I was the shyest child you would ever meet, up until I went to college. If I had to speak in front of an audience in front of my classroom, that was my only experience at the time, I would turn bright red from like here to here, my full body and I mean really, really red and I would stammer and I would have a really hard time.

So the funny thing is that I, very much like you, [00:15:00] did the exact same thing. I still do to this day, I’m sitting here with a piece of paper and I’m not reading from this, but it’s like my prep. So I would prep whatever it was that I wanted in my, whatever it was that I wanted it.

I would just put out there, it doesn’t come out of my mouth all the same, but that’s how I, and even in some of those early ones where I’d be up on a podium in front of it, I’d be holding onto the podium. If anyone’s seen me on stage now they’ll still notice I typically have a notebook or a piece of paper with me at all times, it’s almost like a safety blanket. But I did the same thing with the list of people. And I would have my little things, I would look them up ahead of time because I was so nervous, definitely nervous.

So this is great to share with everyone that now sees us as we are. If you’re one of those people that is shy or feeling like you can’t put yourself out there, that is actually a learned skill. You can learn it. [00:16:00] Sorry to interrupt your story, but that’s great. So you’re involved with tact, like that’s where you left off.

Obviously people were like, now you know stuff about education. What led you to the department of ed? Is that the next transition that you need in your career path?

Sharon: I’ll say one other thing about learning about education. This is like the other part of the have a list in a spreadsheet, is ask people questions because there are so many people that I interact with right now. And I say this to her all the time, so I’m going to totally call her out, Casey Saxes is our Deputy Assistant Secretary of Community Colleges right now.

When she was at the Colorado community college system, she was my first round grantee and I asked her and a lot of her colleagues in that first round of like tactics. So if you’re like a tech one grantee, thank you. I asked them a lot of really ridiculous questions.

My default [00:17:00] is what does the spreadsheet say about, what are the numbers shapes in the spreadsheet? And I would look, and it would be enrolled zero students in the first quarter of the, of the first year. And then the note would be, didn’t receive state authorization, or haven’t been accredited for this program.

And I would be like, why not? What can we do to fix this? And then I would call them up and I would be like, I don’t understand why you’re not accredited yet, or I don’t understand why you need to stay authorization for this. And then I think that because we were on the telephone and on zoom, they would silently roll their eyes.

But then someone would be like, here, read this. This is how accreditation works in the United States. And I would say wow, that’s super complicated and it takes time. I guess it’s okay that your numbers are low if that happens. So anyway, it was really important context and I felt I learned a lot from just people who were very patient with me and explained it to me.

Kelly: Yeah, I think its a really good thing because even especially when you’re not sure what [00:18:00] necessarily to approach a person with, asking questions about them. I was actually talking with one of my colleagues about this the other day, who is a little younger and still unsure of how to build a network.

His idea was he wanted to cold reach out to someone because he’d read their article and he found something interesting in the article. And I was like, do you know how excited someone would be to hear someone number one, read it. And then they actually found it helpful and insightful and had thoughts.

It’s a home run, people love to be asked questions about themselves. So it’s a really good job that you stopped on there.

Sharon: It’s great. I encourage interns that work for me and fellows and all of that, if you read something that you like, you should stalk the person relentlessly.

I think that’s a great way to just also keep in touch with a field that you’re interested in.

Kelly: [00:19:00] Exactly. I love that. This is why I laugh when I hear these things, because I don’t mean to. I’m just laughing because number one, I have a lot of similarities in the way I am. To know you now today. It’s just amazing.

Sharon: So I got to add, because I was part of one of those programs that they have, career development programs and I needed to do it. I needed to do some time. I called it doing time. It’s unfortunate. It was a detail outside of the agency to get exposure and I was running out of time.

And so I just contacted my friends at Ed and I said, the Department of Labor will continue to pay me, so can I just sit in your space for a little while? So the person I stalked at the time was Richard Coletta, who’s the director of the Office of Ed Tech.

And so I said let me come hang out. I know that you don’t do a lot of higher ed stuff, but I’m a higher ed person. And so maybe we could do some higher ed and OET. He [00:20:00] let me come over, and then I think we decided that there was actually a lot to be done in understanding the role of technology in post-secondary education. And they didn’t have a person doing it so I just made it my job.

Kelly: That’s amazing. And how long have you been in this job now?

Sharon: I’ve been in it for four and half years. Yeah, it is fast.

Kelly: Although this year feels like 10 years, but you know.

Sharon: This year, yes. Just takes forever.

Kelly: I know. We can talk about that forever. We won’t go there. I actually even love how you describe that. What you said, stalking. My like PC way to say that is pleasantly persistent. Someone called me that early on in my [00:21:00] career when I was basically stalking and they were like, wow, you’re so pleasantly persistent.

That is a one to say that I’m annoying. In all, it’s really a way to get an opportunity. I think this is really great because there’s something that you wanted to do and you just didn’t give up. I find that sort of like persistence to be really fascinating.

Obviously the work now that you’re doing down here, it all totally paid off and it’s just amazing that you asked, can I come sit in your office?

Sharon: Desperate times.

Kelly: It happens. And it’s great. It’s great that you took that opportunity.

Sharon: So I think this is a really interesting point, right?

Because I feel like I, you and I, and then some of some people that we know are probably in a very small minority of people that have the opportunity to do this. I had connections, I knew people, right? These are people that were in my [00:22:00] social network already or my professional social network.

And so I could approach them. I can’t imagine how to do this, if that wasn’t true. I feel like there are probably a lot of people that are way smarter than me, that could do my job way better than I do, but they just never get a chance because first of all, they don’t. So I felt pressure to get this detail done, because I was going to be in big trouble if I didn’t hit this requirement.

So I had to call around and just be like, I have one week to state where I’m going, what do I do? And so the time pressure, but also people just don’t know that they can do this. And this is something that I like to tell people as well, if you see something that you want, you should just pursue it and you should just go after it because everything else.

I am the most insecure person in the world, but I was forced by circumstances to actually have to get over that and do it. I just think that there are so many people without a social network to support them in doing this.

And that don’t have the connections [00:23:00] and I don’t know how to fix that. This is our universal problem. And so I feel very lucky in the sense that yes, I’m probably a stalker and, or pleasantly persistent, but it actually was successful not because of anything that I did I think, but because I am in a circumstance that allows this kind of behavior to be rewarded.

Kelly: I wonder too, if I think back to my early days before I had a network, I’m trying to even think back, my parents didn’t even have the ability to introduce me to anyone. And not that I was living in any unfortunate circumstances. In the whole scheme of things, I wasn’t super well off or anything but they didn’t have the types of jobs that had potential connections for me.

They tried, it just didn’t work out. So what I can say for someone that just didn’t necessarily have anyone to rely on in those early stages, I just went out [00:24:00] there and asked for it. I was that person just like you said, I would book and this is maybe before the time we can’t do this right now, but I would walk into people’s offices and I would be like, I’ll just wait till they’re free.

And I would wait for 12 hours. I would sit there and they’d be like, well, finally we need to let her in. And these were the highest security offices in New York City. I was like, Nope, I’ll wait. I want to meet with the CEO. It’s fine. But I was nice about it, that is the one thing that’s nice about it.

And I always tried to figure out what I could do to help them and make it valuable, like mutually beneficial. There were plenty of times that I offered volunteer, volunteered myself to get in doing something, or worked for free, like whatever it was. I realize everyone has a different situation going on, but I would not that the [00:25:00] power of that just being persistent in that way and getting over your fear, because I agree with you.

I have had plenty of moments of insecurity. Fear is constantly always there. And I was just like, Nope, I’m not going to listen, push that back down and I’m just going to go for it. And that’s the only way to find out. And everyone, at some point has to start building it.

The stuff you and I do today, these networks that we have now, we did not that didn’t happen years ago. I mean, this took time.

Sharon: Absolutely.

Kelly: So I love that you said that. Thank you for sharing. Throughout this, I normally filter in questions about skills, but really hit on a lot of skills that have led to sort of success for you.

But what I’m interested in is, I’ve heard a lot about what you’ve learned going through at [00:26:00] work in terms of skills, and obviously we’re sitting here today both being very passionate about education and what opportunities that can offer you. So I’m curious how you feel in terms of skills. Is this a combo between work, life, learning, how you build skills? Park ranging activities?

Sharon: Park ranging activities. I plan my park ranging activities on a spreadsheet, just like I plan all of my work projects on a spreadsheet. So I feel like there’s some characteristics about like, just some personality quirks that are very consistent.

Oh, this is so embarrassing. So when I plan a hiking trip, I have like a multi-tap spreadsheet where I weigh my gear and I count the number of calories and I weigh the food that I bring in. So I’m all in on this have a spreadsheet.

Kelly: No I love it, everyone has their thing. Like, this is awesome. [00:27:00]

Sharon: That is my main thing. I read a book like a million years ago and I don’t remember loving the book, but I remember one thing out of it. So I read a book a million years ago called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

It’s like a career development book, but the the thing I remember about it is, I can’t remember the name of the author, but I’m sure Google knows. I don’t know if this is a recommendation or not. So the premise of the book is, pursuing a passion is not the right way to build a career.

And so the book, I think talks about how people who really love baking cookies often find that they can’t manage a bakery. Because there are a whole set of skills that are involved in restaurant management that are not baking. And so he talks about in the book, people who are really good at something or have really interesting careers or do interesting things, do it by building expertise [00:28:00] in things.

Then using the expertise that they have to leverage more and more control. So I think that’s a good summary of the book. If I get it wrong and the author is mad, whatever. So that’s what I got away from it. And the reason I liked it is because it sort of was different to me than everything else that I had read, which is find the color of your parachute or what is your passion?

The thing is I’m not like oh, I have a passion for X, Y, and Z. I like to do things that are tangible right with my hands and so it’s hard for me to be like, I’m super passionate about the earth. It’s not like that.

It’s like an athletic event for me that I trained for like running. There were like all these things that really resonated with me about, versus pursuing a passion. I understand this because I’m Asian, I’m an Asian kid. What that means is I practiced the violin when I was little and I did my math homework. I did extracurricular math homework that was assigned from my parents, not my teachers.

There was all this, you have [00:29:00] to practice like that was sort of the drill and that resonated with me because I actually know how to study and I know how to learn something because my parents taught me all of these things.

Why would that not be true about my job? All the sort of common thread for me was I did a lot of data work that was cleaning data. It’s so boring and it’s on a spreadsheet and you just click and it’s mundane, but you can get really good at data and then you can understand how it works.

When I was in grad school, that was my job. I cleaned data for people like data sense for people. Then you can get another job where you don’t maybe clean the datasets, that you maybe get to be the interpreter of the data.

And then suddenly you’re the regulation writer on the formula, but that’s a whole other thing, but you can actually leverage your increased [00:30:00] expertise in a specific skill to do more interesting things. So I don’t work on data now, but I feel like I understand it.

And so when we have a conversation about why is it important? What are the necessary components for an interoperable digital credential. How do you teach people what is linked open data? I think you and I had a conversation about this, so we have been working a lot in the department about thinking about how do we not only give people a credential for the programs that we fund, but make that credential meaningful and help them get a job?

So we can’t control how employers behave, but we know that there is an initially a language barrier between how the department, the education folks say what people can do when they finish and what employers say they need, and so what if we enforced the digital credentialing to interoperability aspect to some of Emily’s credentials, but then it’s actually very complex.

 In theory, it’s very simple. You want to have a credential, describe what a person that has the credential can do. [00:31:00] But then you have the second order problems. Is everyone describing them the same way? Or are you recording the information then in a way that the format can be received by others?

These are the huge technical problems that you all work on that like many other organizations work on.

Kelly: It’s like the underlying, the surface level. Like, why isn’t it done already?

Sharon: Yes. Make it a thing. I still remember in 2000, way back when TACT was first a thing, people talked about it better aligning employers and educators and training by using skills-based licensure and credentialing. This was a huge talking point and we desperately wanted to align the education data with the workforce data.

That’s been really hard and it kept being really hard because of underlying data structures being really difficult because of the technology that was available at the time. There were not as many mature open data standards. There were not people working on platforms that allowed you to- there were [00:32:00] no open APIs.

Kelly: No, there were like all the processes around all of that.

That was that in and of itself.

Sharon: It was manual and it depended on me knowing you and then you convincing your lawyer to sign an agreement with my lawyer, that it would be okay for us to share, because this idea of sharing the data across silos was also, from a policy perspective, new.

I was thinking about what we could talk about. When you said over 10 years, I think I wrote that talking point for you cause it makes me feel really old, but I was thinking way back when these were all just ideas and little baby projects that have grown up a lot the last few years.

Kelly: Yeah, let’s dive into that though because there are some really amazing things that you’re working on right now.

We’ve got the education blockchains and you’ve got this new innovation challenge, the book was announced today. And then [00:33:00] the new, it was interoperable learning record, now called learning and employment record. And then of course, the cares act grants have come out, which everyone is really excited about because of what’s happening in this time.

I can remember back with the tact grants when we were going through that recovery period and how important that was, so I know this time to get people resources that they need is super important, but there’s so many wonderful things that you’ve got going on. I’d love to hear more.

Sharon: I don’t even know where to start. So today we announced the Blockchain Innovation Challenge. What we want people to do is use blockchains to think about how to empower individuals. And so why we’re interested in blockchains? First of all, this isn’t us endorsing Bitcoin.

Although Bitcoin went pretty high a few weeks ago and I was regretting not being more aggressive in my investment. But blockchain technology has some really interesting characteristics and we’ve made some videos on the office of ed tech website about it. Essentially what it does is allows individuals to have access and control over their data.

Aside from like the [00:34:00] language barrier that we just talked about, there’s a huge problem where if I wanted to transfer schools or if I’m a student who took classes just at three of the community colleges around me, my next step is even more difficult because I have to find the transcripts, which are the verified records that I know the things that I know.

My next destination, whether it’s an employer or another educational institution, they have to decide whether that’s good enough. But they don’t know, they’re making decisions based on the information I provide them like a syllabus or something like that, but they don’t know that they’re not asking me what my skills are.

They’re asking the syllabus, what I read and it’s an imperfect process. And if I worked a little bit, I might be able to do a prior learning assessment or if I had some sort of apprenticeship that might be recorded, but all of the things that I know it’s very difficult to record them and have access to them in one place.

And so I think that this is a really interesting, could there be a technology infrastructure that’s very different. That instead of preserving all of the data in individual silos that you carry every single time at some costs. Could it [00:35:00] be that an individual always has access to their set of data that describes them and could they be the arbiters of who gets access next?

So that is one thing that we’re really interested in. We worked with the American Council on Education and they published a report in June. It was really interesting, some of the observations about how blockchain has been used specifically for that.

And it was mostly an acknowledgement that the education and employment ecosystem is very complex and it’s based on strong networks of relationships because institutions exist in silos. I don’t want people to misunderstand, I actually think silos are good. They protect you. There are some privacy considerations and you don’t want your data just out in the universe.

We know what happens when that kind of stuff goes down. So you want there to be protection and you want accountability most important. So if something happens bad to your data and it’s leaked, you want someone to have to answer for that. And that’s why we sometimes have these structures.

When we want to actually put the person at the center, we have to figure out [00:36:00] how to break down the silos or make them a little bit responsibly for us. So preserve privacy, protect the individual, but give them full access so that they feel like they have control over their next step.

And a lot of the ecosystem, the blockchain projects where they supported a different kind of ecosystem, a way of actually exchanging that data whilst preserving the individuals sort of agency at the center. And so this is what we want people to explore. So we want people to think about what is the ecosystem problem.

And how do we solve it for the person that’s traditionally not well-served. So if, MIT obviously was the first, they were like, Hey, we have our diplomas on a blockchain. And you’re like, congratulations, because an engineer from MIT wouldn’t get a job otherwise. But you need someone to go first to test out the technology.

I love the people that work on it, this isn’t me making fun of them, but what about the working mom? How is she going to figure out how to navigate her new blockchain wallet, or even the 30 million adults who are [00:37:00] not digitally literate, what are they going to do?

The whole point of connecting skills and education is that we want to provide economic opportunity for those people. Especially now there’s something like 40 million newly unemployed Americans, it’s crazy. So how do we get them rapidly retrained or how do we help them communicate the skills that they do have so that they can find another opportunity?

So we’re hoping people will demonstrate how they will support the ecosystem to provide mobility, especially for underserved populations. And we do also want to, again, enforce the interoperability. So we have published a short white paper on education, blockchain, interoperability of the standards that we hope people will use so that across the projects, we can see some interoperability of records.

Kelly: Yeah. And I’ll make sure that when I post this podcast, I’ll include all of that and how to actually apply for the challenge and everything like that, because it’s a great opportunity. Hopefully a lot of people will share it along with this.

Sharon: Yeah. So that’s like one of the main [00:38:00] projects.

But it has that interoperability element, which is a lot of what the other projects are. There has been so much progress over the last few years in this area. It’s just been amazing. I think without getting super nerdy, people using, like Acro adopting the CLR standard or the W3C verifiable credentials becoming mature in that version that people generally use.

Or just even the work that groups like T3, that you guys are doing. Skills, making them open. There’s enough momentum for us to start tying these altogether comprehensively. So we try to do that a little bit by making it a requirement for the re-imagining workforce grants and the cares act.

It’s interesting, I think that you probably do this way better and more than I do, but explain to people who had not previously been introduced to watch to this world of interoperability and data models, helping people [00:39:00] understand how to implement this or how to do this. And trying to make them assured that this isn’t something that they’re not capable of doing, because it seems very technical difficult. Because we’re using words like data models, which to people that don’t listen to this podcast know what that means. Like, I don’t know right.

Kelly: It can be overwhelming for some, but in all honesty, it makes life for your students and the purpose, right?

The purpose, your student success being a job, I would hope so. Not only completion, but it makes it so much better for them. Honestly, it seems like it’s a lot. But it’s not actually as complex as one would think so. Have you been getting a lot of questions about that?

Sharon: I think we got a lot of “what is this” questions and so we have been working on how to help people sort of introduce how to introduce people into it slowly. I think the thing [00:40:00] that it’s difficult to communicate to people that are your grantees or your stakeholders is like, this is different than how we’ve traditionally done things, but it’s also not right, because you’ve always issued some kind of credential that says this person has done a course.

This is just representing that information in a different way. It is maybe a new technical process that might cost something, but this is why we have federal grants to help you over that initial hump. And this is why we have technical assistance resources. We have staff that can help you, or we can have stuff that points to people, other people that can help you.

Kelly: And I know you guys, you guys posted a webinar, right? Just describing the cares act grants. I’ll have to make sure that I get the link from you so that I can put that when I post this as well, just for anyone that didn’t get a chance to catch it or still has questions. And of course, if there are more questions around the interoperable piece of it, we can always figure [00:41:00] out who, if it’s you or other people that might be able to kind of put together like a little webinar for anyone that needs some help.

Sharon: But it’s really exciting. And the other sort of related work that some of us are part of is the learning and employment records project.

There are projects that other people, not myself, so I have the pleasure of telling you about other people’s work and it’s really fun because on one hand it’s like really exciting what other people are doing. But on the other hand, I feel like, oh, I’m kind of lazy. I just don’t actually do any of these projects myself, but yeah.

Kelly: Oh my gosh. You’re like the busiest person. I know.

Sharon: There are some pilot projects and the working group is working on another paper that will show the progress of those, which they’re really exciting projects. They’re partnerships to team that between groups that are part of the workforce policy advisory board.

So the Work Days, the [00:42:00] Salesforces, IBM’s WGU, number of other organizations as well. I think you guys are maybe part of one of the projects too. It’ll be just interesting because you do want to tie together the ecosystem, which is the point. Educational institutions can describe their credentials differently, but if employers in their applicant tracking systems or in their hiring information systems, can’t ingest the information or commit to because it’s a business process change for them as well.

Kelly: It is, I was just actually on the phone with the group, that’s doing the community college growth. Fun. And we were literally this morning just having the same discussion because we were like, but if the employers are not willing to hire these people, that’s like the whole purpose. And how do we do that?

Sharon: Yes. And so one of the exciting things too, is we’re starting to collaborate more, or we have another point of collaboration with our colleagues at the department of labor when they do their workforce employment training grants. They’re also [00:43:00] starting to include them, this requirement for digital inter-operable credentials.

And we’re starting to think about how we can sort of as a whole federal government have a concerted effort to communicate the importance of this and to invest in it.

Kelly: Now’s the time we keep talking about. And I mean, we joke as time is so hard and all of that, but in all honesty, it’s such a great opportunity. We’ve both been a part of the last economic crisis, the fall out in 2008 and the recovery of that.

And if we look back at the impact that happened, and while you were in it, you didn’t necessarily feel how fast things were moving. But now when we look back, I mean, that was such a short period of time in such a burst. And we have that opportunity now to really jump ahead so much further than we would have if we weren’t presented with this [00:44:00] challenge.

Sharon: I think that’s true. Cause I remember like way back when people were like, are you sure you want to force people? Are you sure you want to target investment to like more online modules? Like, online career in technical trading that’s like new. I remember the first, I think it was a Lumina funded preferred on like the CBE landscape when they were like under a hundred CBE programs.

 And people were all a little skeptical. It’s a great idea. Can it actually work in reality? Can people get accredited for it? Then there was simultaneously investments. There were department of ed experimental sites where the regulatory flexibilities were extended and suddenly we have CBE programs and people understand what a competency is now, I think.

Kelly: Exactly. I think we all hope, right. But it’s come so far and I feel like this is just one of those moments where we’re going to look back in few years and see, wow, this was just like rapid advancement and [00:45:00] it felt uncomfortable at first, but here we are.

Sharon: We will get through this. I think we will get through this. Yeah, I definitely will. The human race is very resilient.

Kelly: Yes. I completely agree. Well, Sharon, we’re coming up on the end of our time here and I always like to ask this open-ended question, which you can answer any which way that you like, but is there some last parting words you’d like to share with them?

Sharon: I should have prepared better for this. I will make an offer on behalf of the Department of Education. I feel like you’re going to also pass on my contact information. I feel like we’re always as a team trying to figure out how we can best understand the needs of our stakeholders and how to serve the people that we are meant to better.

So please reach out to me if you have questions about any of the things that I said that are marginally work-related. If you want to hire me in your work for the National Park Service, I am available.

Kelly: Well, I was going to say [00:46:00] if you want to hire her as a park ranger, she obviously wants to hear from you.

Sharon: I do! I absolutely want to hear from you. If you want to build a credentialing platform.

But tell us how we can support the work that you all are doing in skills and credentialing better. Whether it’s programs, you didn’t understand our requirements, what requirements do you think we should have? Or if you just want to tell us about some of the projects that you’re working on that are just really great that you think we can help you amplify, then let us know.

So definitely just everyone reach out to me. Not that I know that I’m supposed to be approachable, right?

Kelly: Yes, exactly. And she’s 100% approachable. I can guarantee that. Thank you so much for that offer, Sharon. I know there will be plenty of people that take you up on that. So for you guys that are looking to reach out to Sharon, she is also available on LinkedIn at Sharon Leu.

And on Twitter @thesharonleu, which by the way, I just completely love that [00:47:00] handle. I was like maybe I should change mine, but I love it.

Thank you so much for listening in to this episode of Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. If you enjoyed the podcast, please jump on one of the platforms that it’s available on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, subscribe, leave some feedback, leave a rating.

I would really appreciate it. And if you want to follow me, I am available on all of the socials, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter at Kelly Ryan Bailey. Thank you all again. And I hope you have a wonderful day.