Skills for Social Impact

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E18 – Amanda Antico

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.

We are joined today by Amanda Antico. Hi Amanda.

Amanda: Hi.

Kelly: Thank you so much for joining us before we jump in, let me just do a little introduction. I get to gush on you a little bit. So Amanda is a social entrepreneur and consultant with vast experience as an educational and organizational development strategist.

Amanda is also a veteran of marketing and business development. Her twenty-five year career is devoted to creating and sustaining entrepreneurial and innovative communities. [00:01:00] Amanda began her career as a Director at AAHE. Amanda, I should have asked you, I don’t even know what that stands for?

Amanda: The American Association for a Higher Education.

Kelly: Awesome. It’s like you think you know all of the acronyms for these educational-

Amanda: It’s all acronyms all the time, all the time.

Kelly: And there you were expanding the TLT, another acronym that we could use the definition of. What was the TLT round table program?

Amanda: Teaching Learning Technology round table, which in these days and age was pretty pioneering twenty-five years ago. And we were the project that was supposed to make teaching and learning work online, and that was in the nineties.

Kelly: Wow. That is so cool. That is awesome. So I know you had mentioned that you were working with like 700 universities around the country at that time with that particular program, which is just fascinating, especially given I’m sure many of us now today and what we’re working on, [00:02:00] especially from a virtual learning environment. For you and I, we know this has been going on this long, just not necessarily been talked about as much as we had hoped.

Amanda: Nope.

Kelly: But after earning your doctorate in Social Impact, Amanda also has taken a consistent theory meets practice evidence-based approach to innovative impact.

She has founded, co-founded, and led multiple social impact organizations, including two public benefit corporations. She has a deep abiding confidence in the ability of economic enterprise to drive societal change and has helped dozens of companies pursue their goals with discipline and purpose.

I really love this. And I also want to mention that in 2015, Amanda founded Evolved Global, a competency-based education company that connects and educates impacted investors, academic talent, practitioners, and experienced mentors to sustainably increase the success rate of social enterprises. [00:03:00] And in her role there, which is on the consulting side, she leads a team of social engineers who serve as the market catalyst to connect the doers, educators, and policymakers for both the for-profit and non-profit community with one another.

This is seriously speaking my language, like I just love all of the focus on social impact. And just one last quick note while I get to finish off my gushing, Amanda also teaches at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the Board of the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy which we were just chatting about in DC, and the Leadership Advisory Council at George Washington University.

So impressive. It’s just amazing all that you’ve accomplished. I know we hit the highlights here, I get to do that for you so congratulations first off, because that is amazing.

Amanda: Thank you.

Kelly: What I think we would love to hear more about is a little bit more detail on where you [00:04:00] started and how you ended up here today?

Amanda: Yeah, sure. Number one, I’m the first girl in my family to go to college. So I’m a proud Jersey girl, as I know Kelly lived in the great state, and we were super blue collar. My dad making sure I went to college was a big deal. And I think when we talk about skills and we talk about the competencies I’ve developed, it all began with that kind of first push of get there and do what you’re supposed to do.

So being a Jersey girl in DC was pretty funny, first of all, I still had to go home for Sunday dinner on Sundays, and I kept reminding my family that was a nine hour commute.

I think the first skill I ever learned was was grit and resiliency because I had to compete with my own family. I would say I’m staying in DC this weekend and they would be like, no, you’re not. So, I was actually a double major, GW, in political science and human services and that taught me a lot. I think you learn debate, you learn how to care for [00:05:00] other people, you learn some deep psychological warfare that you use for the rest of your life.

But I think that the interesting part was when I got thrown into the real work world, I started working early. I went into my career as a junior. I was actually finishing up a little bit earlier in school and the technology projects, and that’s really important right now, the technology projects at the American Association for Higher Education were brand new. And I was working with high mirrors in the market and it was really the first time in my life where I thought, wow, education is the big level playing field.

I really started to see how, if you could reach more people and using the technology get them to really build skills that they would use for the rest of their life, you can change lives. I didn’t know it then, I was very young and I was in middle of this huge change, like when people talk about the 700 [00:06:00] universities, I think well I just didn’t sleep for five years.

And people were like, no, that’s a lot of universities to be working with, but they needed it. They were hungry for it. And that built the baseline for how I got to where I am now. It’s funny, because in March of 2020 when COVID hit, I got so many phone calls from the world saying, oh, Amanda, thank you for doing all that work back then.

And I thought, oh, well, we didn’t fix anything. It’s still going to be a mess. There’s no panacea that the Teaching Learning Movement was actually accurate for the last two decades. So it’s been fun and challenging. But the rest of that career trajectory went through the normal life patterns of five years into a nonprofit, didn’t sleep any day of the week kind of career.

I switched over to consulting. And then from there, while pregnant with my second child, I decided I should go back and get my doctorate which was crazy. And that consulting life was both organizational [00:07:00] development companies, as well as education technology companies.

So I would work with really, really big Fortune 500 companies and then do some ed tech. When I landed in my doctoral world, I realized that I loved social change. But I really, I got the skills. I got the skills to really use the resources and the toolkit that I had been building to make impact happen. I studied the rebuild of New Orleans post-Katrina and a group outside of Jersey City, New Jersey post 9/11, and talked about how we would build what is now evolveed into kind of a staple, which is a periodic table of social elements. What we do is we look at it and say, this is a snippet, a chunk of a skill, you need to have to move up to social impact and social change.

Kelly: It’s so cool. For anyone who’s not seen this, I feel like on the website, if I recall, cause I was just taking a peek at the website a moment ago just to familiarize myself with it, I saw a picture [00:08:00] of it. Now I of course have seen this before, but anyone who is listening, who hasn’t seen this periodic table that you’re referring to, I’ve seen a picture of it. Am I right? Is it on your website?

Amanda: Yep. Yeah. So that work came out of teaching. So one of the things you get to do when you have a doctorate is, well the funny part is social impact was at the hot topic when I finished. And I didn’t realize, I didn’t know that the university would like sell your paper.

I just thought, I mean, nobody reads their own dissertation. So I thought my dad probably read it and that was it. But I got all these phone calls because people wanted me to teach because social impact, social entrepreneurship, everything was super popular. And probably what was that, 10 years ago now.

And so I landed at a variety of universities and realized that we were not doing it right. We weren’t teaching the skills. We were just taking a typical MBA like thinking and saying, oh, let’s put social on top of it. That’s when the periodic table got [00:09:00] born, I was just kinda mad at the system.

So my love about competency began, and I just put everything into chunkable format so that people could get the skills and competencies they needed to both be the change-makers that so much of the next generation needs to be, and as many of us older adults, whatever we want to call ourselves, people who are 20 and people who aren’t 80.

Kelly: I like to say experienced.

Amanda: I’ll go with that.

So we’re trying to contribute back to is being also those Changemakers, just at a very different level, because we’ve been around a time or two.

Kelly: Right.

Well, this is so fascinating. So I just want to take it back for a moment. So you had mentioned while you were in undergrad, it was like junior year when you started actually working.

So how did that come to be, was just this opportunity presented to you? You mentioned that you were finishing early, so did you graduate early and move into the work or were you starting to work [00:10:00] prior to graduation?

Amanda: I did. I did graduate early. I was very eager. I wanted to get out of college.

It’s really funny to say that now, because I went all the way to my terminal degree and I’m literally contemplating getting my law degree because in Virginia, where I live, you can sit for the Bar if you have your terminal degree. Somebody who was rushing out of college is now like, well, how many more things can I get?

And it’s just funny.

Kelly: Why did you want to rush out?

Amanda: I was restless. When you live in DC, you see how much change you can make. I lived four blocks away from the White House. I had cool internships. I saw policymakers walking to the World Bank, on like my coffee run in the morning.

Like when I would meet my friends for coffee and I would drink my water because God forbid I drink coffee. So I think I just saw the world was waiting and I didn’t want to wait anymore, I don’t really remember why it was. [00:11:00] And in DC, association life is kind of the way it is. You walk up and down a block and the acronyms are real. I would run all the time down to the mall and I would just be like, what is that one for?

And then I would like, look them up. I mean, there’s an association for retired people and there’s an association for non retired people. So higher education, the almighty One DuPont Circle which still stands tall for all those.

Kelly: Yeah. I was actually going to ask you did this transform into an association we know today? Because obviously at One DuPont Circle, I can like list off the top of my head in the same building five associations.

Amanda: We are the unique outlier. And this is where I think one of the skills we all need to be thinking about are is, AHE was a very traditional association and had six projects and they all were about grant writing and making a change and whatever. So I must’ve seen something posted about technology and [00:12:00] I was like, oh, this is cool.

And I’m kind of good at it, but no degree in it. And I just thought, oh, well I know how to run things, like I was coordinator before. And they needed a director. I was like, well, that sounds like a big job, but I was like 20.

The two gentlemen who both were named Steve, I called them my Steve’s, I still call them my Steve’s. They were kind of the, I don’t know, they’re not stepchildren. They didn’t fit the model of a traditional association. So we said, well, we’re gonna kind of build a business model here outside of association. And we started charging for our services and we started looking at the programmatic side of our life.

And I started calling up corporate sponsors who desperately wanted us to underwrite our work, because we had access to 700 universities, they want the product, we would run focus groups for them. And so I learned a lot of skills in that job that I still use today.[00:13:00] And so much of it is just kind of right time, right place, but also taking a huge risk.

We decided to separate from AHE our third year in. We called up lawyers, I’ve worked with a lot of lawyers. I will say that’s another skill. Understanding the strategy of law is very important.

Kelly: Is that what makes you now interested in maybe potentially law?

Amanda: Yes. Because it’s strategy, it’s law, it can either bite you in the butt or not.

Yeah. We were in a very unique relationship and then AHE was closing its doors. They couldn’t keep the route going and it wasn’t a happy day because we knew we were losing a pioneer in this space, but it was also that business moment where you were like, you really do need backup plans.

And TLT still stands, 25 years later it’s still an organization. We’ve built a sustainable business model. The Steve’s have gotten a little bit grayer in their grownup life, but they’re making change happen. They’re [00:14:00] engaged with lots of really interesting work as technology has evolved in every direction in our life, but at the core education technology, especially now how do we continue to engagement and the change making that happens for those of us who are involved in it?

So I learned so much. I learned really silly things and fun things too, like I learned that and I can say this probably now, there was a big copier in the basement of that building where if you went the right time of day, you could get all your copies made for free because we were really poor. So I learned how to cheat on the copy machine. And then I would be like talking to the President of Harvard, talking about technology. So it was a very scrappy time of my life.

Kelly: But I feel like, like you said, the skills you learn from having to go through those scrappy moments and trying to figure things out when you don’t have a lot available to you is really sort of that grit that you mentioned.

I know now, actually over the last five years, there’s institutions and other organizations that have built out [00:15:00] like grit courses and certificates.

Amanda: And, at Penn, we have Angela Duckworth and she literally wrote the book on it. So we invite her all the time, I have heard her speak many times at Penn, to talk about that those characteristics.

And I don’t think they were ever new. I just think she gave them a voice and put a really good book behind them. So I think there’s hard skills and there is soft skills. I think they’re emerging. I think as I got into the competency work later in my life, you start to see how breaking those down into digestible format so that somebody can believe, oh, I can do that.

It’s also a confidence builder. You go to like a little kid’s life. If they can’t read, they never get that confidence. If you can’t believe that you can get a skill when you’re 50, then you probably aren’t going to continue a trajectory in your own professional life, and we’re all working 20 more years than we thought we were going to.

We have to keep our skills training and we have to keep [00:16:00] the education and lifelong learning. Not like the mook movement of “yes, I want to learn poetry from some guy at Yale.” cause I already have three degrees and that’s just interesting. But no, like I better learn some business analyst skills because I don’t remember my regression analysis stuff and applying it.

So I think we have to, especially with this amount of people out of work right now, we have to stay focused on skill development and we have to stay engaged skill development.

Kelly: So true. I mean, even beyond this moment of this year, like 2020, the longest year ever. I said, there’s a thousand things –

Amanda: We got to the end of the summer, and my daughter came home and decorated for Christmas because she was done. She’s like we’re already at Christmas.

Kelly: I’ve actually seen a bunch of memes about that and I was laughing so hard. They’re like, whatever makes you happy, just do it.

Amanda: My theory.

Kelly: It’s so true. But to your point, regardless of this year, first let’s [00:17:00] talk about just in general the landscape that’s changed in terms of jobs. We just don’t stick with one job for a long period of time, and jobs just naturally are changing. Mainly because of technological changes, but also other advancements as well. And because of this like natural change, if we just stayed stagnant in terms of our skills, we just wouldn’t be able to move forward.

So I completely agree with those comments. And then you add in this year, people out of work and now this massive change in job’s happening because of certain industries in particular that were affected. And when will it be possible to even go back to those kinds of jobs. So these people really have to think in like bite-sized chunks.

Because it’s sort of like, I laugh at the analogy that I was just about to give which is not really an analogy, it’s more just a story of the scary storage room that is my basement. That I just close the door to. If I think about trying to tackle what is in that storage room in one weekend I just have a breakdown and I’m like, I’m never going to get to it.

But if [00:18:00] I think like, okay, two hours this weekend I’m going to do this one little bit right here. At some point, the basement’s going to be clean and organized.

Amanda: I have a friend who’s doing that with her garage and I will tell you that, so we’ve been socially distancing outside of her garage and a pretty good set up for business meetings. I think she invites me over so that I can see the progress. Because like her wifi is terrible, and I’m like, why are we always meeting here? She’s like, did you see the left side of the garage? Did you get rid of all the tennis rackets from the last 18 years? Okay, good.

So yes, you chip away at this stuff and that’s skill development too, right? I mean, we can’t sit down. Adults learn differently. Adults do not process information the same way a child does. And we’ve got so many competing, complex and stresses.

Kelly: That’s what I was totally going to say.

We just also don’t have like the mental and space capacity to be like, I’m just going to do this. We have to work. We have to put food on the table.

Amanda: And even the simplest things, using all of [00:19:00] this new tech, I work with some of the most incredibly brilliant professors and researchers and educators in the country at Penn.

I mean, they’re just amazing. Many of them could not get Zoom to work. So the training of like, no, you hit the button on the bottom, just click that button. So that’s a skill now. It’s a skill to keep. It’s hard enough to keep a classroom with students engaged in anything. It’s the reason, I swear, I always say this to everyone who knows me. I’m going to teach until the day I die, because the scariest thing you ever do. Is get in front of a bunch of kids. And they will challenge you whether they’re 6, 9, 15, 20.

Kelly: Do you feel like you learn as much from them as they learn from you?

Amanda: I learned much more from them that I will ever give them.

Kelly: I love that.

Amanda: I love it. And my daughter started a company when she was seven, and she had this whole process of 7 to 11 year old kids teaching themselves minipreneurship and [00:20:00] I would come home-

Kelly: That is so cool.

Amanda: Yeah. That was a really cool project. And she rekindled it recently to give kids stuff to do for COVID.

I would come home from my meetings and they would be having their meetings because it was at our house first and then it grew. But I would ask the kids, so I had this situation, they’d be like eight years old, I have this situation. What would you do? And they would give me like a really simplistic kid answer.

And I call my client, I’m like I have the answer to our problem that we just spent three hours talking about. So I think that the teaching and learning side of both skill development and ongoing learning. And it doesn’t even have to be academic. I mean, I think to your point of this shift has been coming, the universities have changed their models.

Micro-credentials have arrived. We need chunks of information to get the better job now. The better skills will get people out of poverty. Like when you look up the level of what we’re really changing with skill development, we’re doing a yeoman’s job. We [00:21:00] should have probably done it three decades ago. We’re probably a couple decades behind, but.

Kelly: That is so how I feel.

Amanda: To be in this field for as long as I’ve been, and think good God, how come?

Kelly: I can only imagine that you must have some of the same feelings that I have. Like there are just days when I might be thinking during a conversation, this is something that I’ve talked about, I swear with potentially the same people 10 years ago.

Amanda: I was having deja vu. At one point, aside from the normalcy of the COVID crisis, people were talking to me and I’m like, we talked about this, but it was in 2001.

And I’d be going to my laptop, pulling up documents I wrote in 2005, 2007. And I’m like, why are these still getting recirculated?

Kelly: Isn’t it crazy? There are times when I see our, I mean, this is always the same. You see articles posted [00:22:00] and I’m just glad we’re getting the attention now.

But I’m like, yeah yeah yeah.

Amanda: I think that everything does happen at a time and place and this inflection moment is, I’m not a negative COVID person, I’ve been very positive about the innovation that’s going to come out. I think that needs to happen both with traditional education, skill development, lifelong learning, all of this.

I think we’re going to be fine. I hate that my kids are virtually taking school, but they’re learning stuff that they would never learn. And I think over time, it’s all going to be okay. We’ve advanced actually much more quickly five years from now.

Kelly: Agreed. So many people have said, like in this span, we’ve had 10 years of advancement.

And I 100% agree. It’s really forced this move forward that just would have taken, like you and I have noticed, at a snail’s pace but it’s accelerated it. And I agree. I can’t say [00:23:00] anything. I mean, obviously the slight negative of the people are getting sick or anything like that, but in terms of us moving forward, I think these moments when people, going back to that grit piece, until you’re actually forced to deal with a challenge, you don’t really know what you’re made of.

Amanda: And I love a good forcing function, right? And it’s in simple things, like when you go to a restaurant now you scan your menu. That’s pretty cool. What is the ripple effect of that very simple thing, right? As a consultant, you learn really early on to look for the little things.

To be a good consultant, you walk around, you know what I miss? I miss my clients. I miss seeing people. I miss going to offices and interacting, because that’s where you learn a lot. But you would notice a lot of little things in environments where you’re like, oh, wait a minute this isn’t the culture here.

And this is what that’s doing here. And how do we build this into the competencies of the organization’s life and what does everybody need to do? So when we look around and we [00:24:00] spot the little victories. There’s a school up in New York right now, Riverdale, they just transformed their campus. It basically looks like a circus and they’ve done an amazing job, right?

So they forced themselves in a very short period of time to make this work. And colleges and universities will follow, they’re going to be slower than everybody else. And then professional skill development, it won’t just be the bootcamp generation, which is what we see so much of.

We’ll start to see some really cool things that are going to come out of this.

Kelly: Yeah. Now that we’ve just talked about your daughter and her business and like these younger kids and stuff, and we talked about this before we hit record because my daughter’s suggestion, who is also by the way she’s 10, and she’s been starting a business.

She was just asking me like, is it okay if we set up an Etsy shop? And I’m like wait, what? We want a YouTube channel, these questions. Well, she’s the one who told me to this morning that if I wasn’t on TikTok my business wasn’t going anywhere. So needless to [00:25:00] say, that generation, my daughters ages, and this is why, again, I hear from them. And I’m not doing any research in regards to this by any means, but more generally speaking, the concept of the way that they learn if they want to do something, is by a YouTube video or a TikTok video.

Yep.

Amanda: Absolutely. And they learn most from each other. Right? I think peer-to-peer engagement is pinnacle at that age. They have all dismissed the talk at me thing, it’s only gotten much worse with virtual learning. And I think that they grew up in this generation, they grew up with this stuff at their fingertips. I don’t think there’s anything that gets solved around my house that isn’t first looked at YouTube.

My daughter was babysitting and I said, please don’t look up how to change a diaper. And she was literally doing it. I will show you how to change a baby’s diaper, like that can’t be on YouTube. And it was of course, a thousand versions of it. [00:26:00] So the good and the bad of all of this video segmentation that I think we’re going through is you can pick up a skill pretty easy.

And it can be a simple skill or it can be a complex skill. And then you look at the systems, then you go all the way to the other side. And you see what else has been coming out of the last year and a half. Well, the Salesforce certainly pioneered the Trailhead concept. Do you want to be a good Salesforce engineer? Here’s our program.

 But you saw within what, three or four months? Big tech companies, the Google, the Microsoft, we’re going to be the people that bring America back to work. They’re building up their own skill environments for 49 bucks a month. It sounds a little cheesy, and it makes me feel like we should all go to Costco and get some paper towels.

But I think the reality is, we chunked the content into a formats that are easily accessible and the generation that’s coming up now, your 10 year old daughter, my 16 year old kid. They’re probably as restless as I was back in [00:27:00] college to get out there and do. I call this generation, the courageous generation. I am in awe of how much they’re getting done.

And if they didn’t have this stuff at their fingertips, they wouldn’t be getting it done. And you know, politics aside, and I know it’s a big election year, you see what they’ve been able to do and manifest using, and like, what are those skills? Cause you saw lots of very active teenagers pulled together demonstrations, but then they didn’t know what to do next.

Right. There’s a point where you have to say, you know one level and you got to go the extra mile now. So you have to be watching for these things to engage the full throttle, a new skill development. Cause you can’t be standing around like, oh, I did get a hundred people here and now I don’t know what to do.

Kelly: And this is where like this pushing comes back to you, cause you mentioned you work with educators, you work with companies directly. So like this is where this thought process comes back. There’s a few things that are going through my [00:28:00] mind as you just described that one of them is that, is that someone who needs some more years under their belt? Needs to experience a few things to have that deeper understanding of what they’re actually bringing together?

Or is there some way to teach that to them. I think about teaching something beyond learning how to do that on YouTube or something, we then have to consider the concept is if you do gain skills through life experiences, YouTube videos, whatever it might be, just through alternative methods I’ll call it in general, not something that’s through like formal education.

How do employers then receive that? Is that as valuable? Is that not as valuable?

Amanda: So Evolve works with a lot of employers and we work with a lot of education institutions. And I think for me, it all boils down to assessments. So, I believe in the read, write, act, kind of philosophy.

I think videos are [00:29:00] powerful ways to learn something quickly. You have to digest information and by reading, you actually do digest it. By writing something down, I don’t care what you’re writing, it doesn’t have to be a manifesto, but if you’ve read it and retained it, and then you documented even through a PowerPoint or like again back to kids because we learned so much from them.

In this house, when someone would needs to make an argument, there’s a PowerPoint presentation. And they learn the organizational skills of why do you want a pink safety kit in your car? I think the reading and the writing is a lost art. I don’t think we’re doing it enough.

We’re certainly not doing it. It is the number one skill that employers are looking for. We’ve had employers tell us 50 times in the past year, I’m getting kids from Stanford, I’m getting them from Duke, but they don’t know how to present to an executive team.

Kelly: Or write an email.

Amanda: They’re missing that communication skill. Then the acting and the doing, they got that down, right? That part [00:30:00] they’ve got down. So where I think to your question, we have to be focused is we have to assess whether or not someone really learned it. And this is where I think employers need to be paying more attention.

Corporate learning environments are crappy. Getting a course on Coursera doesn’t mean you’ve learned anything. Even the ones that have been building stuff. Anybody who’s been through Trailhead, I can say this with love and affection, they will tell you how to cheat on Trailhead to get your Salesforce administrative certificate.

You can cheat on the whole thing. So did you learn it? You have to prove it. And to me, where employers really should be looking and paying more close attention is, let me find a way to assess you both within your peer group as well as with your potential client group. Whatever client you’re serving. And then lastly, and probably most importantly to yourself.

So like, if you’re just fibbing about some skill that you have. First of all, job descriptions are [00:31:00] horrible. Secondly, nobody doesn’t lie on their resume. And thirdly, your LinkedIn can say anything you want. My favorite LinkedIns are the ones where everybody says, like I did this and I did it that way.

And then everybody who supports them, says how great it was that they just said. So you’re obviously just self-promoting. How do you prove that you know how to do it like show me evidence. We have a client here in the DC region, a rather large bank that most people will know what I’m talking about because there’s not that many around here.

And there’s a test at the very end. That is the test. If you’ve gotten through the entire interview process, you have to take this particular test. It’s like on the black market in the DC region, you can find it, you can cheat and then you can go in and pass that test. So you can get that job and then day one, be completely ill-prepared because you actually didn’t prove the skill in a demonstrative way.

So we need to be paying very close attention to how skill development is actually utilized.

Kelly: I mean, I completely agree with [00:32:00] you. This is something that I’ve been like pressing on lately quite a bit. It’s just this concept, people keep asking about well how do we figure out proficiency level of skills and all of these things. Which again, I try to think more broadly, like to me, it’s the doing. How do you show? And that leads to this other question, which is we tend to talk about this miscommunication that happens between educators and employers, like we’re missing each other a little bit somehow.

Where in the educator view, we’re teaching our students this thing. We’re testing them and assessing that they have these skills, but then the employers are like, we’re going to have to retest because we don’t actually know if it’s in comparison to the way we want them to be.

I’m just curious your opinion on this, do you think that that just has to stay the same? Like if we lived in a futuristic world, could one actually trust the other? Could there be something?

Amanda: It would be divine. [00:33:00] I have very strong opinions about this. I have been singing this from a mountain top. I don’t know why educators haven’t been talking to the corporations. Our whole world would be so much better if the educators were in a dialogue, ongoing conversation that says, okay, so-and-so major employer out here in my region. What skills do you want students to have when they get?

In DC, we know what our industries are, we know what we were supposed to be preparing for. I can go to Dallas and I think, what’s the new nickname of Dallas? Wall street of the West. They’ve got 30,000 people that are coming out there to do financial stuff.

Well, let’s give those people some financial literacy skills, right. You know almost by region, what the employer, and the point of education is not what it was in 1863. It is to get the job. So why haven’t the educators been talking to the corporations? Why is there this old school mentality of we know what’s best and [00:34:00] we’ve been failing them?

I mean, we’ve been failing to the corporations for decades and it’s coming back to bite us. I see few glimmers of hope. UMGC here in the DC region, phenomenal job really trying to have that conversation, but those are much more working adult types. Traditional education is still very far behind on this.

We need to fix it.

Kelly: It’s interesting. In the span of time that I’ve been working on this as well, the groups that, there was this level of community colleges that were just fantastic at employer engagement, truly. They were amazing. And then there were, I would say like the continuing ed pieces of a more traditional university that tended to have this engagement, more of these what they would refer to as industry partners, but broadly it wasn’t happening. So there’s a few indicators that, yes, this is possible. It’s just that one piece that seems to, in any of those [00:35:00] groups that I was involved in, that is still there. There is a very few far in between where an employer implicitly trusts what a school is outputting from their program.

Amanda: And every survey. I mean go to all the traditional things that we’ve been doing. Every survey tells you that they’re not happy. When they do pour a bunch of money into recruiting the best and the brightest from such and such school, they’ll get one or two candidates. I’ve had to sit down and have some really difficult conversations with my corporate clients and say, so I interviewed six of your university partners, you spent $10 million and you don’t actually know what you’re getting. Because I’m going to tell you that you’re getting nothing. And that’s just waste of resources, waste of time, waste of talent. And what could you be spending those dollars on? The passion I have is about upskilling the current employee.

Let’s upskill the person who’s sitting here, loves their job. Of [00:36:00] course we have to recruit, of course we have to keep bringing it from the outside, but what are we doing for the person that’s inside and saying, I’m smart, I want to learn something and I don’t need to go back for two years and get my MBA.

Let me do this other thing. And I’ll do that.

Kelly: And for that employer in all honesty, like if we break it down to this, it’s less expensive for them to do that. So this is like a win-win scenario. But what I was going to say about your comment in regards to the recruitment, because we know it’s these top level schools, and the thing about that is in terms of like diversity and inclusion at this point, there’s just not a lot of that happening at those schools.

And so when that is your recruitment strategy, there’s a few layers of potential areas that I would say need to be disrupted with that. Not only do you not necessarily know what you’re getting, but it means that maybe you’re not looking at other people that are truly well-qualified because you’re only focused on this one audience.

Amanda: Yeah. I think D&I is [00:37:00] certainly at the center point of every conversation we’re having these days for obvious reasons. But same thing as this is a problem we should have stopped 20 years ago. You have so much more collective innovation when you have diversity in thought in that room. If you don’t bring that diversity and thought into the room because you didn’t employ them, then it’s not about the fairness equality thing, you’re actually hurting your business.

It’s so

Kelly: true. It’s one of my favorite books and I’m going to totally butcher the name of this, I’m going to have to look this up and post it later, but it’s like something to do with the Renaissance. And it’s just the concept that at that time they were bringing in minds from all different fields into that one location for the diversity of thought. That was the whole purpose.

And it’s interesting now, even, and I’m sure this is the same with you, like some of these initiatives that we’re involved in. The whole concept is to bring diverse people together. Because if we just bring people that have had the same experience, the same upbringing from the same perspective, you only get that view.

Amanda: You’re preaching to [00:38:00] the choir. So aside from the social nastiness of all of this that we’re living, the other problem is you’re just thinking, well, of course you built it for one audience and only that audience is going to buy it because you didn’t hear from the 15 other people who are purchasers of whatever you’re doing.

So to not have diversity in thought is just crazy. But again, this is where you see this intersection of generations. We launched this summer, an amazing organization out in North Carolina called Get in the Game. And it’s 12th graders who are literally having racial conversations about how can we be on an equal playing field?

If it starts early enough, and then by the time they’re the leaders, by the time they’re in their presidential location and whatever company that they’re going to be working for, they’ll get it from day one. Your point about upbringing is a really good one because so much of everything starts in the house and there’s nothing wrong with where you grew [00:39:00] up or how you grew up or when you did.

I mean, most parents want their kids to have roots and wings and that’s what we’re here for. But, what you get exposed to as you grow up is really pinnacle to your business life. So when you are a business person and you look around, it’s your responsibility. I love some of the more interesting D&I work, but it shouldn’t be because there’s a crisis going on. It should be just the normal, yes let’s have that going on.

This should’ve

Kelly: been going on. And just like our work and skills, this was actually going on. It just was all under the radar this year. It’s sort of like, here’s everything, we’re all living out loud.

Like every issue and challenge that’s been like, we’re slowly doing our work behind the scenes. Like now it’s all out front and center, which again, to your comment earlier, like that is the beauty of this moment. Is that it’s collective too. You talked earlier about like 9/11 and the work you did in North Jersey and then [00:40:00] Katrina, it’s not as in a disaster that’s happened in one locality, one group of people.

This is collectively global. And I think that changes the whole game in what we can do to move forward because everyone can feel and taste and smell what’s happening.

Amanda: Well, that’s what’s interesting. There is something really nice about being able to say, well, everybody’s going through this, right?

If it’s a little different than when, “oh, well, this never happened to you.” Disaster relief is unto itself a whole other ball of wax, but really it’s isolated. This is probably the only time in our lives I hope, knock on wood.

You never woke up and thought, I’m going to live a pandemic, but once you start doing it and you have that conversation with everybody around the world, right? I mean, I work globally and I have clients all over the joint and it’s really funny to be like, oh, we’re actually all this and the skill development that we’re all [00:41:00] facing to get better.

I think this is why I’m such an optimist about all of this. We’re all going to be better because of it. Conversations are going to be different. We’re going to be a little kinder to each other. We’re going to love more paces with each other. And the other thing about the amazing thing about the zoom culture, which I’ve loved to watch – who I’m like, I’m so sick of zoom and everything else, and I’ve been taking zoom holidays, but we all see each other’s human now, right?

Like when someone’s coming into your living room or your kid is jumping on their head, or you’re on the phone with like a CEO of a major organization and you’re like, oh wow he finished the bottle of Jack last night.

We kicked into each other’s like personal livelihoods. And as a result, when we do come back together, which will happen and we’ll have to continue and no one ever thought we were going to get on planes again after 9/11, we were on planes five days later. And the only change that came out of that was TSA.[00:42:00]

And if you traveled before 9/11, you didn’t know what TSA was, you just now it’s like ugh it’s so much longer. But that’s it, that was the big change that happened. We’re going to be fine and skills are going to have to develop, and new industries are going to emerge and people will thrive I think coming out of it. And you’re right, I think one of the most interesting parts of our conversation today is this has been brewing. I think the organizations that are collecting skills openly, I think what you guys are doing is fantastic and saying, well, what is the new norm of skillsets?

It’s not what the education providers think they are, because the data-driven world is here and you have to pull from the data to say, this is what we’re doing. It’s so vitally important to the success of our growth as a nation, because the other thing is we’re not the most loved nation anymore, either.

We [00:43:00] better get our act together.

Kelly: That is very true. Even though through this conversation we’ve threaded in all of this work, the two last pieces that I’d love to have you touch on is just a little bit more in-depth, again, I had heard you mentioned the employer’s really craving this communication layer of skills that is just missing. Is there anything else in your particular work that you are really seeing as something that is standing out in terms of what employers are looking for, what educators are doing? Like this future view in terms of, I mean, I just love the concept of what you have. So anything that you’d like to share, I’m all for it.

Amanda: Yeah. I think they’re looking for a comprehensive solution. If I look at the last 18, 24 months of our trajectory of work. You go in, you assess what the situation is, you talked to a bunch of corporate learning people, you try to [00:44:00] connect the dots between where are you getting your education for your employees? Where are you getting your relationships with the universities?

And what I keep coming up with is a pretty simple approach to, it’s almost like a dashboard of having a pre skilled assessment. So as you get somebody into a job or into a role, you see what they do know. And then on a regular basis, again, going back to the periodic table, you build out. What we’re doing with our clients is we’re building competency maps, and we’re putting those tools in the hands of both the management and the person who’s doing the work and saying, okay, are you good at this? Do you know this? If you don’t here’s your off ramp. So like you’ve got to know Basie and modeling.

I don’t know, Basie got it. People need to know basic math. So, but like, you didn’t mind that I’ve learned it or you might be rusty on it, but this is critical to your job right now. They need a. That says, this is where you entered. This is what you need to do. And then this is how we’re going to [00:45:00] assess you on a regular, ongoing basis.

As we are developing new skills within the organization.

Now, are you helping them put together this

assessment? Yes. We’re trying hard. I think corporations need to open their minds a little bit because. Many of them will use the term enablement, which is a terrible word. I do not like it’s for all the corporations listening, stop calling your corporations, enablement, it’s learning, we’re learning, we’re lifelong learners.

Or you get a badge, you know, badges is not, they are not outcomes. Right. It’s a badge. Right? So, so I think that the build a rigorous rubric based assessment with learning science behind it. And make that cycle happen. You have that dashboard and you have these maps and it’s, it is like, you know, it is a trail of journey and that’s what they’re, that’s what they’re craving because it costs them a ton of money.

When someone doesn’t know how to do their job, right, that’s, that’s got to stop and people want to do their job. I think the other thing I really respect about human beings is when you give them the roadmap they’re motivated to learn. [00:46:00] But if you don’t give them the roadmap, they don’t know how to learn.

Right. They don’t know where to go. Exactly.

That’s the business we’re in and that’s, we’ve been doing a lot of fun work with it. Some corporations are getting at other, we’ll get stopped at the, at the gate. Like now we’ve got this and you’re like, okay, fine. We’ll we’ll see you in six months when you don’t.

Yeah. You all at everyone listening or watching definitely has to check this out. I’ll listen to the website at the end, but it’s just a really fascinating process. Something that I think we’re all trying to solve right now. So really on point. And Amanda, the last question that I have for you is just to throw out an open-ended question at the end of our time here is just really for our audience in terms of, you know, advice, if you will or maybe some like last parting thoughts in terms of them being on their journey in life, what would you like to.

Send us your

message in their life, like in general or in their business life? Well,

I think, you know, I tend to, and this is up [00:47:00] to you, how you interpret that. I tend to think of life as including all the twists and turns of both, but that’s okay.

I look at my life as a continuum. You know, I don’t, I’ve never been the kind of person that veto work stops because my work life is so entwined with my personal life.

So I like to say. You know, I think we can make today ridiculously amazing. I mean, I think if you really look at each day and try to make the absolute, most of it just make it ridiculously amazing. And that is what my, my last words would

be so true. I love that. So make life ridiculously amazing. Well, thank you again so much for joining us today.

For all of you out there, you can find more information about evolve global on twitter@evolvedforthenumberfourimpactorevolvedglobal.com. I will go ahead and post those on social when I when this is published so that everyone can access those really great [00:48:00] organization. Amanda is doing amazing work.

Keep an eye on that. And I just want to thank you all for listening into let’s talk about skills, baby. If you enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate sharing, subscribing making some comments and please send some feedback. You can also follow her. Find me on social media at all the socials at Kelly, Ryan Bailey.

And that’s really it for today. We appreciate your time. Hope you have a wonderful

day. Thank you so much, Kelly. Thank you, Amanda.