Design Thinking + Education = Future of Work

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E16 – Chike Aguh

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 can help you live your best life. My guest today is Chike Aguh. Chike, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chike: Thank you for having me.

Kelly: I’m going to give a little bit of background on Chike before we jump in. So Chike works across the sectors on creating a future of work for all.

He is the Inaugural Head of Economic Mobility Pathways at the Education Design Lab. There, he leads the Community College Growth Engine Fund, which is an innovative tri-sector and $2.5 million effort turning community [00:01:00] colleges into bridges to careers in high growth fields, for every American learner and worker starting with nearly 4,000 in six communities.

This is really an amazing effort. You guys, we’re going to jump into this a little bit more later, but I will say that I am just like so excited for the work that you’re doing around this particular effort Chike. And just to give a little further background about Chike, because this is very interesting to me, by the way.

So Chike is also a Technology and Human Rights fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where he is writing a book on the future of work and racial equity. And venture partner at Maryland-based New Markets Venture Partners, where he focuses on workforce technologies. He is also a faculty member at Columbia University and an advisor on social impact to Baltimore-based upskilling the technology startup Catalyte.

Previously to this, Chike worked as [00:02:00] Education Policy Official under the Mayor of New York. He was a second grade teacher and Teach for America Corps Member, a Fulbright scholar in Thailand researching education skills.

Definitely want to hear more about that. He was also the Director of Corporate Strategy at Education Advisory Board. I think most of us might finally know them as EAB. CEO of a national social enterprise, which helped connect 500,000 low income Americans to affordable internet and digital skills, and Senior Principal and Future of Work Lead at the McChrystal Group, a business advisory firm founded by General Stanley McChrystal.

He has also served as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Future of Work task force, expert advisor to the American AI forum, and Inaugural Future of Work fellow at the International Society for Technology and Education.

This is honestly such a huge honor to have you here. [00:03:00] Chike, I hope you don’t mind if I’m just going to continue to gush for a moment because this is, I know, can you sit through it? Is it okay?

Chike: I will sit through it. For my wife and my mom, they’ll really appreciate it.

Kelly: I know, isn’t that the best? But, Chike, I want to recognize, because this is a lot of work that you’ve put in for all of your accomplishments. I want to recognize his degree is from Tufts University, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School.

I think I mentioned already, that he was the president leader of Scholar, the past Council on Foreign Relations term member, 40 under 40 Honoree from Wharton and the Washington Business Journal. And Chike, I believe if I remember correctly, you guys live in Prince George County, Maryland. Is that correct?

Chike: Absolutely.

Kelly: Wonderful. And I’m joining you guys from New Jersey, just so everyone knows where we are. Sometimes these virtual things, it’s a little [00:04:00] funny where we’re like, huh? We’re not together. Where is everybody? But I love that area of Maryland. So Chike, you have your wife and one son?

Chike: One.

Kelly: Lovely.

Chike: Feels like three, but one.

Kelly: No, no, that, I mean, Hey, kids are kids. So what’s his name?

Chike: Calatche.

Kelly: And how old is he?

Chike: Three and a half.

Kelly: So you guys aren’t yet worried about what the school year is bringing or is he supposed to be in preschool or anything?

Chike: He was going to be, and we’re still trying to actually figure it out. We’re like many other parents frankly where things change every single day.

And I think school districts, like I used to help lead and others like trying to do their best right now. And figure out how do you do education differently? It’s a conversation in K-12, higher ed, workforce development. And I think we’re all kind of living through the maelstrom right now.

Kelly: It is so true.

Honestly, it’s just an interesting time. Let’s put it that way. So I know I was able to give the highlights, but I would love to jump in a [00:05:00] little bit more and learn about really more in-depthly what in your journey has really led you to where you are today? Because these are some fantastic accomplishments and I just love to dig a little bit deeper for everyone that’s listening.

So first of all, that’s super kind. Thank you so much for having me, thank you for having a platform dedicated to this issue. I would argue that making sure that every American worker, American learner, has the skills they need to be successful. I frankly do what my family did. That’s my biggest challenge, right?

And as a country and the fact that we’re suffering the consequences of having frankly not done that over the last 50, 60, 70 years. And so for me, Bill Clinton, he has this great phrase where we are all prisoners on biography and that’s definitely true. So my family based from a small rural village in Eastern Nigeria that most Nigerians themselves will never go to, my parents didn’t go past middle school.

My father is one of 9, my mother’s one of 11 Peace Corps volunteers in their classrooms. They actually grew up over the hill from one another. If you actually go to my fathers house you can see my mother’s house quite literally. My [00:06:00] father, he got a golden ticket. He got a scholarship to come study here at American public university, the University of Texas in Austin. He arrived here late 1974.

And the only reason I’m sitting here is because of that. And so when I think about what brings me to this moment, I know what American education did for my family. Literally I’m sitting here talking to you and I have been granted the opportunity to go to highschool. That’s the power of American higher education.

And when I think about the work that I do now, it’s how do I use this American education do for everyone family to know what it did for mine? I’m not here because I’m smarter, any more deserving, I got here because the coin of fate fell in my favor, and I got access to this thing. And the question is, the only evidence I’ve always had is how do I, again, take what I’ve been given and hope to turn that back to others.

And so that’s now the biographical. And then I think, going throughout my life, what I’ve seen is we’ve seen the systems fail people. So whether it be again, whether it be when I was a teacher, whether it be [00:07:00] in my time in education, the private sector, the social enterprise space, amazing educators and people trying to do amazing work.

But in the end we have systems that aren’t working the way that they’re supposed to. And particularly when you think about layer, you layer some of that inequality around race, gender geography. We have inequalities and billions of dollars for too long. We’ve got to change that particularly, we’re going to do what I want to do, which is again, how to other families do what my family did.

And so that is what has really brought me to this point. And so whether it was me working in New York City government, in the largest school system in the country. One fact is the only institution that serves more meals a day than the New York city public schools is the army. 1 million kids every single day.

I didn’t even know that stat. That’s amazing.

Chike: It’s one of the ones we used to always love to use, whether it was me being a second grade teacher in Brooklyn, not too far from where Jackie Robinson lived when we played for the Dodgers, brought in the Thai countryside as a Fulbright scholar moving forward. At EAB we bring everyone on to work on the digital divide or keeping with stone crystal future of work.[00:08:00]

That’s been the thread that’s run through it. And the other kind of sub thread that I’ve kind of looked at, and I think it’s something that I think we all learn as we get older, which is the older I get the less I realize that I realize that anything worth doing can only be done together.

And I think what I’ve realized on this problem particularly, and why I’m really so proud of the community college is that we’ve got to bring the right people together. So pushing the same direction at the same time, that’s the only way this gets solved. This is my time in government, my time in the private sector, and my time in the social sector.

There was no way I ever made progress when it was just me, or just my organization, just my sector. And I think we all know this but we forget it sometimes. And it’s so easy to stovepipe and to point fingers. And particularly in this moment, we’ll dive deeper into this moment around this issue being a future of work and how education can help us all be successful there.

We’ve got to work together and I think by hook or by crook, by force, by heart, lesson learned. I’ve made a part of my [00:09:00] instincts in terms of how I perceive these problems. So that’s really what brought me to this point. And it’s been it’s been a wonderful journey and I think it’s one, that’s never going to, at least for me not going to end there, I’m going to kind of lay it all out on the field until I can.

Kelly: Yes, I bet. I mean, my goodness. So I want to jump back to the first thing that you mentioned, which was how everything that has sort of happened through your life and your parents and your grandparents, how that sort of shaped how you wanted to look at your life. And I wonder if there was a moment in all of this that really cemented the fact that you wanted to essentially pay it forward.

Chike: It’s a really good question. And I think again, life is a series of moments. I’ll say one and it’s one that’s always stuck with me. The first time my parents took me to Nigeria was Christmas 1989, I was 6 years old. I didn’t quite know what was going on. For a kid, I actually grew up not too far from where you live Kelly, and going from New Jersey to Lagos, Nigeria, and then actually going [00:10:00] out to the place where my parents grew up was a shock for any kid.

But I remember this moment. And for those of you who’ve traveled to many countries, I’ll describe a scene that I’m sure you’ve seen before, which is you’re driving, for me, it was on the road that goes east from Legos to a number of states is where my family’s from. And you stop. And usually, particularly if you look like you might have some resources, you stop and folks run to your car and try to sell you stuff. From gums, a coat and batteries, so on and so forth.

And we stopped and that happened. And I remember being six years old and I looked out the window and on the side of the road, there was a boy who I’m pretty sure it was also six years old. Honestly, he looked a lot like me. And I looked and it was all very weird moment. And it was part of my one moment of clarity as a six year old. But in that moment, I basically was like, really he could be me and I could be him.

And it was this weird, quick juxtaposition that I saw and that’s that realization. And that picture has always stuck with me because again, the only thing that separated me from them is that my dad got a [00:11:00] golden ticket and his mother or father whoever took care of him didn’t. Again, nothing that I did, nothing that he did, but simply that nice edge. That flip of the coin.

And I think at that moment, I think what I didn’t know at the time, but I brought forward with me is there is a reason that happened, and that reason isn’t me. And so, to be honest, it is incumbent upon me to try and spread that back and make that flip of the coin worth it.

So I still remember that moment, almost 30 years. It has absolutely stayed with me. And I think all of us have moments like this. Where frankly, we realized we were on the right side of something on the wrong side of something.

Kelly: You’re right, everyone has something in their life, this is the first time I’ve heard of this happening at such a young age. Plenty of things happen at the young ages, it’s just that typically you don’t hear that the person really takes it to heart [00:12:00] in that way and understands it in that way.

Which is just fascinating to me that at that age, it really hit you in that way and so strongly. So I can only imagine what that must’ve been like to experience firsthand.

Chike: Absolutely. I think throughout our lives and what has been the work that I’ve done, again, you see people that frankly you could have been if life had gone very different, or maybe not so different in a way.

And again, the question is what do you do about that. You can walk on and say, Hey, this is what it is. Or I think for me it was hard, what am I going to do about it? And I think I’ll say something. And then also there’s a place where I really have to give credit to my parents. They drove that home for me, you know, I grew up in the church.

And so those who did as well, you’ll remember this praise. My dad had said to me, he said, look, the odds of you sitting where you are, are the odds of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. He said to me a lot. And so I really took to heart. It’s never left me. I’ve never forgotten it.

And [00:13:00] you read a very kind introduction. I know that’s not all me. I know there’s very much the luck I’ve had, the blessings I’ve had, the people who’ve been in my life, the people who did things we didn’t have to. And finally, there are lots of people who weren’t as lucky as me.

And the question is, what do I do about that? And for me, this is the way that I think that I can contribute, because I would argue that this future of work. It’s one of the three biggest problems that we confront as a species, not even as a country, as a species. The other two for me are how do people who are different live with each other, whether that’s in front of white supremacy, whether that’s white nationalism in places around the world.

And the other one is frankly, we’re living through now is extinction level events like pandemics. Yeah. Those are our three biggest challenges. And that first one, the future of work is the one that I think I can help move the needle on. So I think for us, and also the question of how do you find that syncs with where you’ve been with, syncs with what is needed. One of my good friends, he talks about how ideally your purpose lies at the intersection of what the world needs, what you love and what you’re [00:14:00] good at.

Kelly: Oh, I love that.

Chike: You know, and I think for me, this is where I went.

Kelly: Yeah.

I think as I hear you describe this and obviously as I’ve read through what I mentioned earlier on when we started today or, you know, the accomplishments that you’ve had in your life. I’m really picking up on the fact that your parents, they played a huge part in really that sort of instilling that about those values in you.

Although I will probably add, and most of us wouldn’t necessarily say this about ourselves, but I see that as like, they instilled these values. There was some to not something in you that made you want to go after these things. And I’m sure that there were plenty of work ethics, skills, all of these things.

And I’m sure even, maybe in a way strategically you might’ve been thinking through like what you wanted to accomplish in every different move that you need. You don’t sit back and think [00:15:00] like, these are all the things I’m going to do, I’m sure. But there was help and there were all of these things that happen, but I’m sure that a lot of that also had to do with what was in your heart and what you wanted to do after.

Chike: Getting to the what skills may have brought me to where I am. I’ll say, I think it’s a tough one. I’ll start with my parents. I think my parents are a very classic immigrant story to this country. Everybody, for those of us who’ve lived that experience, there is a level of hustle that comes with that experience that definitely is passed down genetically.

I still remember, I told a friend of mine, this story recently. When I was nine years old there was a school holiday and so I was home, I was watching like cartoons and my dad was coming downstairs. And my dad is a physician and he came downstairs, briefcases, ready to go to work.

And he looked at me, said, what are you doing here? And I said, oh, it’s a holiday. School’s off so I’m going to watch TV. And he looked at me like, I mean, literally, like he didn’t understand what I just said. And he said, so what you’re going to do son, is you’re going to go and says, I’m going to date myself.

You’re going to go [00:16:00] upstairs to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you can do a book report on the Seven Wonders of the World, and I want it by 5. I was like, I don’t even know what those are, and so I had to figure out what the Seven Wonders of the World were first, which I still remember to this day. And then I had to do a book report.

 Every time my dad ever saw me on a holiday, he did that and basically it instilled in me, I realized I now have a hard problem staying still, I have a hard problem. Not using every moment. That’s I think number one. Number two, and my dad always said to me a lot, he’s like, look when I came to this country in 74, a lot of people, he wasn’t the only one there about 20 of them that came.

And he’s like, I was one of the few who was able to make it all the way through. A lot of folks went back because either for life reasons, other things like that. And he said, look, I’m not here because I was the smartest I was here because no one was going to outwork me. I watched my father, even to this day my father works, I mean, 100-120 hours a week. He’s a physician, an OBGYN. So he delivers kids, he can do a [00:17:00] C-section in his sleep. And that level of work, even today, me and my dad would talk every week and I was like, I’m so tired. He’s like, did you deliver five kids yesterday?

And I’ll be quiet. Cause I realize even today I don’t work as hard as he does. And then I think which was nothing that they planned but I think something that I think has helped me throughout my career is, I grew up in Central New Jersey, and there weren’t too many other people named Chike Aguh in Central New Jersey.

And one of the things which I’ve come to appreciate now was I learned to deal with difference. I learned to deal with people who are different from me. Morphologically, ideologically, and today it is quite, more challenging as a child, but today being in the work that I do have done previously, being able to work with folks, government, private sector, nonprofit, different political ideologies, geographies – it has been quite useful.

And to be honest, we don’t have enough of that right now. And again, I learned just because of the way that I grew up, there was just no way around it, but we need more of that now. Because again, when you look at the biggest problem, They’re [00:18:00] too big or too complicated for any one person. There is no Messiah coming.

There is no knight on white horse. Someone once said to me, there are no silver bullets there’s only silver buckshot. And it requires that concerted effort. And it also that interdisciplinary narrative which weaves through my education, which weaves to my training.

And I think, I think that’s the other thing that really came up from come from there and then going through my career, I’ve been lucky to have, and this does go into skills, those call them essential skills, 21st century skills, human skills. A lot of them are frankly honed, not necessarily through the credential or reading a book, although those are super important and great foundations. Again, we at the lab, we do a lot of that, but in the end, they’re honed like a coach.

They’re honed like a player and their coach. I have people who pulled me aside and said, Hey, by the way, in that meeting, don’t do that again. Or in that meeting, when this person said this, here’s what they meant, or, Hey, did you hear their [00:19:00] voice when they said that, actually means they weren’t, that they didn’t say this, but here’s what their voice is.

Like those types of skills I learned because people frankly had like the grace and the kindness to pull me aside and tell me, and again, how do we replicate that for every American learner and worker?

Kelly: But also there was another piece to that that. When someone pulls you aside and gracefully tells you that, there’s sort of two ways that people take that. Because there are some people that get upset about that. And then there’s other people that are like, oh, fantastic. I’m going to practice now. I’m going to hone that particular piece because I want to get better. That whole concept of, like you said earlier, as I get older, I realized, I don’t know everything. I mean, I think we both agree that lifelong learning is definitely, there’s always something to learn.

And so you take that very open-mindedly. And I think that that’s a huge difference. Yes. I think it’s fantastic that we can recreate this and hopefully we’ll do through a bunch of these initiatives for [00:20:00] more people. But we also need to consider like their mindset and taking that sort of what we might call constructive criticism, whereas they might look at it differently.

Chike: No, I think it’s right. I always use the example of I’m a sports fan, a coach and a player. And now I will say, I had the grace and the fortune, and that there also has to always be a level of trust between mentor and mentee. I always knew these people have my best interests at heart, and so I took that feedback very, very, literally. You’ll get a lot of feedback across your career.

The question is who you take it from? And I was fortunate that I had people who cared. You are right. You have to be open and be willing to act on it. And also, which is which is a skill. Tell people how you need feedback. For example, for me, I learned very early getting general feedbacks not helpful for me.

I need to know. All right. I wasn’t assertive enough in a meeting. Let’s just use that as an example. Tell me exactly how that showed up. Tell me, and then tell me exactly how you would have done it differently. And that’s the lesson of [00:21:00] how you want feedback. And as now someone leads people, that’s not how you give feedback so on and so forth.

And so those little things, again, I learned by hook and by crook, the hard way, like lots of Hills and valleys along the way, as I’m sure we all do it in our careers, that was critical for me. And the question again is how do we give people at least the opportunity to get that?

I think we have too many folks, particularly when we think about the people that we now call essential workers. They’ve always been essential, but how often, how replicable is the experience that I had, for them? Similarly, people who feel for what we call frontline workers and truly now frontline, because literally some of them were putting their lives on the line to keep us safe and so on and so forth.

Not because somebody’s paying them. Well, that’s a very important conversation, but also are we giving them the pathway? We’ll talk about pathways to a career in economic destiny of their choosing. When you hear the stat that between 50 and 80% of job postings are posted are filled with, without a job posting. Those [00:22:00] non-technical skills, those social capital, they use that phrase, which again, a lot of us realize we didn’t, that a lot of us got and didn’t even realize it. So critical.

And again, if we want to forget, predict the workforce of the future, that has to be as much a part of that convsersation as the technical skills, which are critical, super important. If you look at the most, the fields that are most that are most in demand, they actually are a blend of those two things in these hybrid professions, data science, for example, it’s a mix of design thinking, art and also statistics and so on, so forth.

And those are the people who frankly, will be in indispensible. But how do we make sure that we’re giving both folks? And I’ve been fortunate. I was lucky to get both, not because of me, but because frankly the coin landed in my favour.

Kelly: Like we said, the coin landed, but then of course, like you said, with your father to this day, I mean, if he didn’t take that in the way that he did and work as hard as he did, it wouldn’t have mattered where that coin went and for some people it didn’t.

So I really, I [00:23:00] find that an important note to mention to our audience, because it is true that yes, some of you might look at other people and say some of these things that just happens to be the good fortune. Yes, there are moments in all of our lives, but it’s still a crossroads and we can take that crossroads how in very different ways.

And I think it’s so amazing that your father took that crossroad in his life in the way that he did and how much you’ve now seen and how much he still instills in you to this day of how important these pieces are. And now you can see like this, I know we’re talking about skills, and the skills that you’re chatting about that are making you successful are sort of this mixture of the skills that you’ve learned growing up from your family. These more technical related skills that you learned through education and some things that you’ve learned in work environments from mentors, it’s really this whole mixture that creates the sort of like hybrid unique individual.

And, and I’d love to hear more about how you might think we can [00:24:00] make that a possibility for so many other people, because that is the thing. I do agree, I even to this day, feel fortunate for the experiences that have led me to where I am. It I’m never one to say that it was always an easy road by any means, that we’ve gone through all of our challenges to be where we are.

I still feel lucky and how do we help other people get to that point in their life? And like you said, that system of like leave where you’ve seen people left. That is also a frustration for me.

What are some of the things that you might suggest for other people to really be able to kind of live their best life?

Chike: It’s a great, great question. I’ll say I think a couple of things. Those you’ve written, Carol Dweck growth mindset. One of the things that my dad who believes in this, he didn’t know what the words were, but he did it.

He’s basically said the only thing that separates you from what you want is hard work. That that was his belief. The way I like to say is, the definition of luck and I didn’t make this up, but the [00:25:00] definition of luck is the meeting of preparation and opportunity. So opportunity is common.

You can’t control that, but you can control how prepared you are. The belief in that equation is I think really critical. I think that’s number one. I think number two, you see this particularly from folks who frankly come from less means, for those who are able to meet up a measure of success.

A very big focus on technical skills. I want to be the best at what I do and the technical skills of the job, but at times what you see either not a focus on, or frankly not the mentorship toward is those non-technical pieces. Yeah. Again, those essential skills, leadership, communication, creating the right networks that are going to make you successful.

Those are just as important. And one place where I usually double down here is if you think about the majority of Americans are employed and small businesses, small businesses are in a little bit of a tough place when it comes to skills because they don’t usually have full blown talent in HR departments.

One of the things that small businesses usually do really well because they’re small is mentoring, coaching. How do we help small businesses do that better?. Yeah, and how do we help them do that with more [00:26:00] capacity. It’s actually a weird advantage they have versus some of the large organizations, which are far more structured, far more bureaucratic.

So looking at people who may not get that, that’s a place where if we were invested in small businesses for them to do that type of mentorship in a really more formal way, I think a lot of workers would be very successful. The last thing that I think about is how do we make it easy for folks to get the technical skills that they want in a much easier fashion.

 I went to a fair amount of grad school. If you want to get any type of formal four year degree in this country, I won’t say it’s easy. Student debt is a big problem. I still have a ton. But right now, if you want to go get a bootcamp certification.

If you want to go get a micro-credential, you have to pay for it out of pocket. If you don’t have a lot of means and you’re working, it’s really hard. We’ve never as a country to come up with an alternative form of financing for that. For other countries, they just pay for it. Right? Sense of upscaling in some countries, companies get a tax benefit to do it, I think.[00:27:00]

But anyway, I do see some companies today, folks like the skills fund who are thinking about how do I create an alternative financial market for this. But we need an answer that’s more structured and more clear for a lot of American workers, because you have a lot of folks who are like, look, I have to pay to take care of my family.

Kelly: There was other responsibilities that, you know. I think everyone always dreams that they can do those things, but just sometimes life, responsibilities, things get in the way. And it’s the structure that we created here, it really lends itself to a more traditional learner that may not have those aspects of their life.

And, and that’s a shame because unfortunately there’s a lot of people then that are left out.

Chike: Absolutely. And again, 50 years ago, you could frankly go to school once. Do one career for a long period of time. And now we know workers will have up to 10 jobs during their lifetime. They will need additional skills along the way.

And so frankly, the systems that we created 50, 60, 70 years ago have to adjust. We’re not adjusting fast enough and we need to, and again, we’re seeing the pain of it right [00:28:00] now. Again right now, probably a good portion of American workers needed to learn to go use zoom in the last six months, it’s changed everything. Or if I think about retail. Being most retail shelves stocking uses an iPhone enhanced barcode scanner, we use that.

That is a job that we would never considered a technology job before, but now it is advanced manufacturing. We can go down the road there in terms of learning to fix robots, learning using computerized lay, things like that. And where does someone learn to do that? Maybe they learn it on the job, but right now we just don’t have a structure and a system for that.

And we’re suffering for it right now. And again, we’re at, I believe between 10, 11% unemployment, not seeing since the Great Depression.

Kelly: What’s interesting too, about this time is that not only, and I’m actually just curious about curious about your thoughts here, because obviously I feel like education is slightly behind on their innovation, and now we’re in a moment in time where you see extreme innovation [00:29:00] happening with organizations.

I think about just like you mentioned with, in a grocery store now, for all of this time, I don’t know about the local grocery stores for you, but are the salad bar area of the grocery store has been closed, right. Or there’s someone there who will like serve it out. But I have heard of so much technology to make that a completely contactless technology, enhanced operating situation.

And to me that sounds very like almost clean manufacturing, because someone’s going to have to operate that equipment, check that equipment, be there when something goes wrong, but they’re not going to need to do the typical, you know, they may have learned at some point how to actually serve out food but then that’s not going to be their job

Chike: I mean, and you’re healthier than I am. I’ve seen this more in the bakery section where the doughnuts are, which is sort of general but its the exact same thing. The example that I use a lot is the example, so when we talk about future of work and what will work [00:30:00] will be, and we’re seeing this here, there are two issues and one of them gets more play than the other.

There is, what technology will obviate jobs entirely? Vehicles is one example where they’ll be driving the vehicles and what’s a commonly held profession by an American man. And between 20, 30, and 2040, a bunch of those people, no need for them. The other part of this, which is frankly, less talked about but is just as important, McKinsey says roughly a third of jobs, this will happen to. They’re still going to exist, but they’re gonna be drastically changed. And the example that I’ve always used here is the loan officer. So when our parents wants to go get a loan, there was a person at the bank they went to. You brought a ton of documents, they flip through your stuff.

They took a look at you. They interviewed you. And that person made the call about whether you got the loan or not. Today, when I present on this, I’ll usually ask how many of you have gotten the loan in the last year for something? Usually a portion will raise their hands and I’ll say, let me describe to you roughly the interaction that you had. You went in, you brought your stuff and you met with them.

And at some [00:31:00] point the loan officer left the room and they came back and they’ll tell you if you got the loan or not. And I’ll always ask, what did that loan officer do when they left the room? Some people will say, oh, they asked my manager, oh, they look at the paperwork. And at some point someone will say they asked the computer and I’ll say, yes.

They use a multi-variable progression. We put it all in stuff and the computer told them if you’re going to get the loan or not. The job of the loan officer still exists, but it’s not making the choice about whether you get a loan or not. The computer is actually better at that now. Their job is front end sales, on the backend what we call it, chomp management.

 Meaning they want you to get more loans with the bank. But that job was entirely different. And I was a miracle for those types of shifts. That’s the up-skilling conversation that we talk less about that is for incumbent workers, very, very important.

And particularly when you’ve got now race, inequality, privilege on top of all that, those are who are least likely to get that type of [00:32:00] stuff. And that that’s going to be as big a job as an overall automation of jobs entirely.

Kelly: Completely. And then I think about, I mean, I know you mentioned like the driving aspect of this, and that is one area, especially now that we’re going through this recovery period with COVID.

I mean, we all don’t know how long this will go on or any of those answers yet. Right. But we do know that there’s a lot of people that are unemployed. We want to get them back into work. And a lot of times the getting people back to work phase, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re looking at what’s in the best interest for the future.

There’s a ton of truck driving jobs open right now, for example. And it’s very common for us to say, okay, well, like obviously these are open jobs, so lets push people into this direction, but as we’re sitting here saying with automation we full well know that within the next three years, Those jobs are going to look very different.

And a lot of the typical, and then, so what do we do? How do we help people? Yes, recover right now. We want to get them back to work. We want to make sure that [00:33:00] they can take care of their family, but we don’t want them in the next time that we see a situation like this, hopefully nowhere near as bad, but there that’s just how the economy works with ups and downs. When the next time we have a downturn, we don’t want them to be in the same position. We want them to be better off, right.

Chike: This is actually is a really good pivot to talk about the work of the community college, because we’re really looking actually to use this, to answer the question that you just asked.

So let me describe the moment that we were in before COVID. Let me describe COVID then let me describe the fun and I’ll talk about the lab a little bit as well. Before COVID we were in a place where, because of historic inequality and advancing technology we were going to have, according to McKinsey, between 60 and 66% of jobs either automated entirely or changed so swiftly that workers couldn’t keep up.

Now add the novel crisis of COVID and this is all [00:34:00] accelerated. People ask me what has COVID changeed? I argue COVID didn’t change much and frankly just pressed the fast forward button and a lot of those trends so fast that it’s been really painful. So now as we sit, and to the Community College Growth Engine Fund.

And just to give you a bit of background on the education design level I’m privileged to work on. We’re 7 years old, and we like to say we are redesigning higher education to fit the future of work. Our founder basically said, let’s take the design principles that you see in Silicon Valley that make the iPhone really easy to use, that came up to help us create the squeezable toothpaste tube.

And you also use that to actually redesign higher education to get people in, not just going into a job, but into a career that can sustain them for their entire lives. So we’ve done that with over 135 colleges around the country, 70 employers, multiple regions, and whether that be with single moms students, whether that be folks looking to transfer into new pathways. We do a great amount of work with Alamo community colleges down in Texas to upscale a number of folks in their Metro [00:35:00] area.

And so about a year ago, our leaders come up with this concept of the Community College Growth Engine Fund, which is the challenge that you just described meets an idiosyncratic solution that you see on a crunch of building a system to attack that challenge. And so we said, when you look at a system we said we really want something that is ubiquitous, that has capacity.

If you want to think about what is the Walmart of higher education? It’s community colleges. What I mean by that is look at Walmart. There is a Walmart within 30 miles of every single American in this country. Community colleges aren’t quite that ubiquitous, but pretty close.

They have a footprint in every community, that’s number one. Number two, they serve the people that we most fail. People of color, women, working adults, first-generation students, students with disabilities. And, which most people don’t know, they produce the majority of American undergraduates, depending on the year.

They’re looking at between 50 and 55% of American undergraduates come from community colleges. An [00:36:00] under known fact. Most folks are not going to Harvard or the University of Texas to get their degree. They’re going to Prince George’s community college, or they’re going to Cuyahoga Community College right near Cleveland, or going to Seattle Colleges in the great city of Seattle, Washington.

Kelly: Exactly, exactly.

Chike: That’s where they’re going. And so we’ve got to figure out how we can use this system as part of this effort. Franklin community colleges have been beleaguered for the last 34 years to the underinvestment and frankly a lack of focus. What’s clear is as well, community colleges, aren’t going to do it by themselves.

No one can do it by themselves. So how do we bring the entire ecosystem of players, employers particularly, or Chambers of Commerce Unions, local governments, foundations, to the table to frankly create an ecosystem and an engine, a growth engine again, to get people not just back to work, which is important, but frankly, for some into work for the first time and not [00:37:00] just work, not just a job, but a career and a career pathway.

So the Community College Engine Growth Fund, which we came up with a year ago and to be honest, when our deal was first said, there wasn’t that much interest. And then COVID happened. And we went from 5% of employment to depend on what you look at 13, 14, 15% of people said now we get it. And so the Community College Engine Growth Fund tri-sector multimillion dollar effort that will be in six regions across the country. We actually just selected our six schools, we’ve not announced them yet. But amazing trailblazers. And each of those schools is coming with their entire ecosystem of partners. Primarily employers come together to say, we are going to create what we call micro pathways. Two or more stackable credentials that are going to lead to a job in a career, in a high growth field.

And when we say high growth, we mean a field that is growing that has projected demand. And we’ll pay at least the area meeting rates. That’s how we’re finding a good job at this moment. [00:38:00] And again, that’s going to grow and change over time, but that’s the task. And each of these institutions is going to is going to help at least a hundred people get through those pathways.

Our definition of success is in the next two years now, almost 4,000 people in work, not credentials, not participation. All those indicators. And, and the last thing, which is going to be a, an outgrowth of that is what I call it roadmap to scale. Once we do that, we want to study it, understand it, and then progression.

So we go from thousands to millions. Yeah. Currently we have over 30 million of our fellow Americans out of work. And when I think about what I want to be the result of this is that just community college growth engine fund was a model and a catalyst of a huge dent in that. That’s my hope is that when they tell the story of this moment, they’ll say this was the time that we said we’re going to create a things have worked for all of us.

We’re going to be an economy that works for all of us. And that community calls growth engine from the institutions that we’re part of it helps us show showed away. And that’s really our our [00:39:00] costs here. That’s our mission. That’s what I get to get up and think about every single day. And now let’s talk about.

If this were easy, this would have been done. Of course. And I’ll say a couple of things. Some of them may be controversial. One community colleges division between community colleges and employers. We have lots of great community colleges. We’ll work with a lot of great employers. Both of them will extol each other to talk about their advisory committees, their advisory groups, but to do what we’re talking about is going to require a level of coordination that has never been seen.

Even from our best community colleges, very simply we need employers to one be clear than they ever have been about what they need in a job. Not just years of experience with egregious things that they’ve used for years. But you know, if you talk to someone like Connor diamond, a Yom in Marin America will tell you every job has its 32 components, sub tasks.

Does every employer know what all those are for each job that they want to sell? Secondly, they need to be willing to, once someone actually shows that they have met that, [00:40:00] be willing to make the HR journey really easy for them to get into work. And again, U. Oh, yes, it is just as hard on the community college side, because of the way that we’ve designed American higher education, that we basically try to fit everything into the form factor of a two-year or four-year degree.

Those are great. They’re not, they aren’t, they aren’t bad. They have a huge crime scene out there on the market. But right now, because work is changing, we need additional types of credentials that are clear on. And so can community colleges and the strips that we create, frankly step outside of historic frames and create those quickly and iterate with employers to make sure that they are on what we need them to be.

You and I were part of a conversation recently with a, was a large employer who works with, with education institutions. And one of the questions that they asked education institutions is tell me about a pathway or a credential you created that you can change because employer. Yep. If that, if that instance you can give an answer, they move on [00:41:00] because the show that you don’t have that level of, of iteration.

Now on top of that, how are we working with K-12 institutions who are doing dual enrollment? So kids are coming in from high school, can do the same thing. They want to go to work directly. If that’s what they choose, how you working with your local union, a lot of whom are using apprenticeship programs and frankly have lines directly to jobs.

Where are your foundations? The Franklin could potentially help plug gaps and provide rapport and support. This is a level of coordination we’ve not seen at scale. It’s always terrifying, but also really exciting and challenging here because we can figure this out. I think we can provide a roadmap for the rest of the country.

And for me, what I say is kind of, we create popups that are powerful enough that one employers will hire folks as soon as they come home, almost sight on scene, because, and I’ll tell a story about this in a second because they trust. The same way to be quite honest. If you would have an employer who could hire every graduate from the, from the Yale class, they will deal with it because they trust the product rightly or wrongly, but they do.

But secondly, how do we get them to recognize the value of those [00:42:00] graduates? It put money back into the community college because it actually saves the minor’s ROI. We can crack that nut. We get, we go a long way towards solving this. I just did a webinar recently with the VP of the Arizona college of nursing.

And the D the week before graduation, he got a phone call from a health system who said, how many nursing graduates are you going to argue to graduate this year? And on a couple of hundred, he said, I’ll take them off site on scene. Just literally, he basically has a place he put in a purchase order will workers, because the shortage is so in need.

I believe the cynicism in California. How do we get there are folks who are that desperate, but the question is, is there the path that makes. Exactly. It’s

creating. It’s almost like creating a talent pipeline for that organization. I mean, organizations are struggling just as much to keep talent that has the correct skillset that they’re looking for.

I mean, we all know the whole slew of problems when it comes to the miscommunication that they have in describing what [00:43:00] their needs are. Like you said, that’s something that needs to be working. But I think through what you, you made a good point, which I think is really interesting. And I’m like, I mean, above and beyond all of the pieces that I think are you guys focusing on are going to make such a huge difference?

You just reminded me sometimes how many barriers are along the way for people that are the, just navigating, what to focus on in school. All of the processes around, you know, getting accepted and all of those things. But then when you, even if you are strong enough and your work ethic is where it needs to be to get through that process, once you come to getting the job, like to actually getting the job, what you go through, which is what you just reminded me of what you go through on the side with HR, that’s a process in and of itself as well.

And sometimes there’s how many follow-ups do we have at that point? How many people are getting lost because of the systems that are just. Reading and understanding a person’s background. Or like you said, the inequalities in the hiring systems right now. I mean, [00:44:00] there’s just so much there. And if that’s something that you guys can move the needle on and also all of the other pieces, I mean, I feel like that’s just going to make the process so much easier for so many more people.

Absolutely. Everyone needs to grow it. Everyone needs to change. We have a lot of conversations about how community colleges need to grow and change. The only ones, there’s a great cartoon that I love, which is it’s a guy on stage. He’s giving a lecture to a crowd and he says, who wants change? And everyone raises their hand.

Of course, if they want change, then he asks, who wants to change no hands going because, and that’s most of us, no one wants to change it. Someone else has to do, particularly those two parties, community colleges and employers. We’ve got to get that. So we ha we have to get that to work. I say, this is an equity imperative and it’s an economic imperative.

We know so many companies who I talk to every single day and say, I cannot find the people that I need. Right. There are people here

Kelly: all the time.

Chike: The question is, how do you recognize them and how do you get [00:45:00] them in quickly so that they can do the work for you. And for folks on the higher, the hygiene side, how do you produce a pathways with modality that folks can trust?

That’ll get you there. And if we can crack that nut and they believe we can leave me with. Particularly with this many people unemployed, we’ve got to do it. And so that’s what I get to work on every day is why I’m lucky to be in this role. That’s why I’m exciting. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kelly: Yeah. That’s fantastic.

Well, we’re coming close to the end of our time here. Cheeky, and I thought I’d ask you one last question because. Leaning back to the description you gave us at the beginning here especially with the relationship with your father and your family on just these wonderful values that they’ve instilled in you.

I wonder if you have in mind, do you have a young, you know, three and a half year old son, if there’s something in particular? Because a lot of times as parents, we think about this maybe in a different way than we think about this for ourselves, but are there certain, because when I say values a lot of times, We’re describing skills that we really want to teach the young people in our life and our [00:46:00] children obviously very close to our hearts.

And you know, is there something in particular or a group of, you know, values in particular that you think are the most important ones that you want to pass along to your.

Chike: It’s a great question. One thing I think I’ll say as well as, as parents, I think we at times think about imparting values and super important at times.

It’s also about validating things that are already there in our children. And so I’ll say a couple of things that my son does naturally, that I want to encourage. So one thing about my son is a lot of energy. He’s a big runner, but also always not the most, but not always the most careful. So he, he will fall in the bathroom is right.

He doesn’t cry. He pops right back up. And I only a purse that forever. I, because like seventh, he doesn’t skip a beat. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t get upset. I felt, okay, cool. We need a lot of us probably start that way. But as life goes on here, we’d get more scared of both Paul and we’re scared. And I want to encourage that.

I always don’t want him to be afraid of falling. And that’s part of who [00:47:00] he is. I’ll say to. He is, he’s a big jumper. He’s in his jumping stage right now. He just jumps all the time and particularly on the stairs. And that’s essentially Johnson. He doesn’t look terrifying, but it’d be honest. There are times you have to jump and not look.

One of the things that you hear from, from employers a lot is I want someone who can just figure it out. And at times you have to jump, not look and think. Yup. And that’s a really terrifying but you have to be willing and able to do that. When, when, when you think about the biggest opportunities right now, whether it be from a capitalist perspective, the person who started likely didn’t know how this was going to happen, but number one, they had a basket of skills that allowed them to figure it out.

And frankly, someone said to me, once the difference between someone who’s great and someone who’s average is that the person who’s great to stick out the pain five minutes longer. Interesting. And that’s kind of what you want. Someone who has the, hopefully the basket of skills to be successful, the courage to take the [00:48:00] risk and the ability for the perseverance to bear the pain that’s going to come and it’s going to come anything worth that.

Some of my daddy’s always telling me nothing. You know, he used to say nothing in American spring, nothing that’s worth having.

Kelly: So true. And I mean, there is no growth unless you have those challenges. So the fact that you’re, that’s the areas that you stress. And, and I, the reason I asked this about with your son, because it’s just, it’s, it’s something that I’m sure you would also suggest to anyone else.

These are really important for you. So no matter if you’re a child or. Failing is part of the process not being afraid to do that running towards it, just taking the jump.

Chike: Absolutely. Absolutely. No, my when I used to work with gentleman crystal, and you’ll hear some folks who are in the military talking about this at times, you need to run toward the sound of the guns, not, not away, cause that’s, that’s what the impact and the change and the opportunity list.

And I think particularly now, Particularly to what this challenge as many people towards as possible. It’s why, again, I thank you so much for what you do and the promises that you have, because [00:49:00] right now this is the sound of, of the gods in terms of how do we get people into work into careers and how do we make sure that that’s everybody, everybody means everyone.

Kelly: Yeah. I typically say run towards the pain or run through it, you know, because like what’s on the other side is what, where the magic. Absolutely.

Chike: Absolutely.

Kelly: Yeah. Well, cheeky, thank you again so much for joining us today. I cannot say enough wonderful things about the work that you’re doing. First of all, like just getting to know you as a person has been such a pleasure.

So thank you for all of the time that you get beyond the podcast, by the way, cheeky and I have been spending time together on various zoom meetings and such, and I just tell someone to give a shout out to education design lab in general. They buy, I’ll give a little story. I actually was before shutdown.

I was in the offices in your offices in DC. This is before cheeky joined, but this has just really says a lot about this organization. Whatever happened was I had my three children. With me. [00:50:00] And I didn’t want to cancel the meeting and kindly all of the staff were like, just bring the kids. And we had a design thinking session in one room.

My kids were in another room set up with, you know, Play-Doh and Legos and candy and all of the wonderful things that kids love. But I. They were just involved in it and it made it, honestly, it was one of those days where the kids just had such a fantastic time. It, it really made me even more involved in the process and it just really, you know, the, that, so the value that, you know, just the values that the company in general are instilling and that, Hey, this is life.

And like, we’re just going to go with it. That really said a lot to me about, you know, the people of that organization and everyone there and what they truly are focused on. So I’ll share that with everybody because it’s really just fantastic. So for anyone that would like to find cheeky on he is available on LinkedIn and Instagram at cheeky goo or on [00:51:00] Twitter at C R a goo that’s a G U H.

You can also learn more about the community college growth engine fund. Let’s see it’s ed design, lab.org/project sash growth engine fund. I’m going to link this all on social media. You guys and education design lab is also on Twitter at ed design lab. Cheeky, if anyone wants to get involved with this particular work do you suggest they reach out to you directly?

And is there anything that you’re looking for in particular? Hmm, great

Chike: question. So if you want to help on there big on the growth engine fund, you can email CC G. At ed design, lab.org and books that we’re looking for. Really anyone who wants to take part, always looking for additional institutions that want to learn more about the work also for employers who want to help us get these folks employed.

And then lastly, we’re really looking for system level thinkers. We’re looking to see how we can replicate this work beyond these 4,000 going forward. So if you think you want to be involved email [00:52:00] ccge@designlab.org, and we’ll be happy. Perfect.

Kelly: That’s fantastic. Well, I thank you all for listening in to it.

Let’s talk about skills, baby. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, share. I would also love to get a rating and review, and I’d love to hear some feedback and suggestions. I want to make sure. The content that we’re providing here is really valuable to you. You can follow me, Kelly, Ryan Bailey on all of the socials.

And you can see them here. I hope I’m pointing to the right place at Kelly, Ryan Bailey and all of those areas, but I really appreciate everybody here. That’s been joining us and listening in really appreciate you joining us again today. She gay. And I hope all goes well with this initiative that you’re running hope.

Everyone has a wonderful day. Thank you.

Chike: Thank you.