The Prescription for a Healthy Workforce is Equal Parts Technical Skills, Cultural Competency, and Lifelong Learning

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kelly: You’re listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I’m Kelly Ryan Bailey, and this season we’re talking all about The Great Resignation. The global pandemic disrupted so much for so many, and one of the largest effects has been on where, when, why, and how we make a living.

We’re taking a look at why people have been shifting jobs, paths, and careers at such an accelerated rate, and how leaders from different industries are navigating this challenging time. Hope you enjoy this episode.

Hey skills nerds, with me today is Van Ton Quinlivan. Van is the CEO of Futuro Health, podcast host of Workforce RX, and best-selling author of her newly published book Workforce RX. Congratulations on your book, Van, and thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:00:59] Van: Thank you, Kelly. It’s a joy to join you today.

[00:01:02] Kelly: Oh, that’s so nice of you. Well, first of all, I want to pause before we jump in and just give a little, like, I’m going to clap. I know this might sound loud to everybody, but congratulations on this book because I am sure that that was quite an endeavor and you know, it is just amazing to have that out in the world.

[00:01:20] Van: Writing a book turned out a lot more challenging than I thought, but it’s great to have another item off my bucket list.

[00:01:29] Kelly: How wonderful. So let’s start off with what led you to Futuro Health and why do you do what you do?

[00:01:37] Van: Well, Kelly, my career in workforce development has spanned the private sector, the public sector, and now the nonprofit here at Futuro Health, but it all goes very, very far back, why I do the work that I do. In 1975, my family escaped from the Vietnam War. And I was a child six at that time.

And when we came to the US, my father had been a neurosurgeon, which is sort of an alpha of the world of doctors and my mother had been a teacher back and in Vietnamese culture, that was also very prestigious job. And when both of them came to the United States, they really just had to start from scratch and had to enter different occupations just to make you know, meet. And interesting enough as I grew up they never expressed any regrets or bitterness about the escape from Vietnam the family having to restart.

Instead, They were always grateful about the opportunity that it created for us. And so I feel the work that I’ve been doing in workforce development has been to pay for that opportunity to others. When I was at a big 20,000 person energy company I was able to bring that company from having no opinion in workforce development, to becoming a nationally recognized best practice.

I was appointed by the governor after that to drive the workforce mission of the California Community Colleges, which is the largest higher education system in the nation with over 2 million students and really brought a lot of investment, growing investment, public investment in workforce programs so that students can more effectively land in the workforce. Growing that from about a hundred million to over a billion dollars.

And then I’ve been asked to take on this opportunity right here, which is how do you grow the next generation of healthcare workers in the allied health field? so If you take out the doctors and the administrators, 65% of the frontline workers of of healthcare is in the allied health field.

[00:03:34] Kelly: That’s a really powerful story. And I’m so excited to dig into a little bit more about Futuro Health. But before we do, I did have one quick question. What is the top skill that helps you on your journey to becoming a CEO?

[00:03:51] Van: Well, you know, in context of the large resignation I think I had my soul searching a little bit earlier on in my career. And what I needed to do back then was to really make my avocation, my vocation, and that’s a difficult journey, right? So what I found when I was in the high-tech sector was that I was spending all my time, my spare time, my restful time, opening up education policy journals, and magazines.

So I would be flipping that all day long instead of reading tech journals. And I think that over time that that was an indicator of where my true interests was. And I do have formal training with a double masters MBA, and also a master’s education policy, but I wasn’t using education policy at that time.

So it became a journey for me to figure out how to marry my avocation and my vocation. But where would I focus in terms of education? And back then, no one cared about the community colleges from a public policy. But a friend invited me to come into the classroom, cause he said he was tired of hearing me talk about education.

But I didn’t know to get started. And he said, you know, why don’t you just come into my community college classroom and teach? And when I entered the classroom, there were roughly 50 students and I only saw five white faces in there. And it occurred to me that California’s workforce would come through the community colleges more so than even the four year system.

And that began my journey of volunteering, of researching, of having conversations, of serving on committees and boards to build up my credibility and I did that while I took a few years off of corporate life. And that’s what I did as well as teaching in the classroom. And that began my journey to begin marrying my avocation and vocation, which is really hard to do, because you actually have to give up, you know, how you perceive yourself at one point in order to really begin the shift to become who you could be.

[00:05:53] Kelly: I feel like this advice is going to so resonate with some people that are, you know, going through this shift that we are going through right now after this pandemic. So thank you for sharing that. So with this big shift that’s been happening right now some have coined the term, The Great Resignation, it’s sort of put healthcare in this light, right? It’s in the forefront of our minds and that is what Futuro Health is working on. You mentioned you’re solving the healthcare workforce shortages. So how do you do that?

[00:06:25] Van: Interestingly enough Kelly, the Atlanta Federal Reserve and McKinsey & Company were doing studies on, you know, where are the good jobs across all of the states? And no matter which state it turned out healthcare one of those industries that is providing pathways to good jobs.

So for Futuro Health is squarely as a nonprofit serving that need. How do we connect people with the right skills into these good jobs? And we started in a very simple way. I mean, we started with first an investment, an unusual investment of allies, which is Kaiser Permanente, a big healthcare system. And a union, FCIU United healthcare workers.

They have a hundred thousand members who all work in hospitals and through a conductive bargaining process, they decided they’re going to put $130 million to grow the next generation of workers and credential them. And thus Futuro Health was born. What we’re doing is trying to chip away at these very, very large numbers.

 So for example there’s a shortage of 500,000 allied health worker in just California alone. So roughly 2.3 million across the country. And most of these careers can be accessed through education that requires less than a bachelor degree. And as I’m sure all of the audience would agree with me, you know, when we’re sick or when we have family that’s sick, we certainly want our share of healthcare workers in our backyard.

The pandemic has really shed light on that. And so how do you begin chipping away at a number so big in California with 500,000? Well, one option we had with the money that was our seed capital’s was, Hey, we can become an accredited institution and go that path.

But what I saw was that path, that strategy, would be too slow. We needed to solve things at scale. We needed to solve it in an inclusive way, and we need to solve it in an agile way because, just like every everything else affected by the pandemic, the skillsets shifted overnight in the pandemic.

 You were going into your doctor or the hospital for your medical appointment and overnight you couldn’t anymore. Everything shifted to a virtual rooming for you to go see your medical practitioner or your doctor. So there was a tough technology element to how care was being delivered that was driven by the pandemic.

So agility was so important. So what we did was instead of trying to be an accredited institution, we instead became the builder of an ecosystem of partners that we curated. So they were all quality partners and then different partners had different core strengths. So there are a number of partners who are education partners.

And what they do best is provide quality programs that lead to health care credentials in occupations that we cared about. And then there are student success partners, there’s recruiting partners. So it’s building this ecosystem of the willing and undergirding all of that with an infrastructure of data science.

So that we could customize and target the experience and the student journey so that students can be successful. And Kelly, what’s great is that our average age of student is 30. So we’re effectively serving adult students at a moment in time when the rest of the country across the board, that’s like an 11% decline in community college enrollment.

Almost 5% decline in university four year enrollment. So adults are very reticent, they’re shying away from a degree attainment at this moment in time, but they’re willing to build their skills. So, being able to effectively resonate with the adult population and then creating a journey that brings them back into education is so important right now. And Futuro Health is delighted that we can do it. We also have like 76% diversity and around 35% bilingual. So clearly working to build a workforce reflective of the communities that we’re trying to serve.

[00:10:36] Kelly: Wow. I’m just like blown away by the numbers that you just shared. And hearing the percentages that have reduced in other areas of education and where you guys have been so successful, I wonder is this because of the shorter term nature of the program?

[00:10:54] Van: Well, as I mentioned, if you look at the Gallup polls that have been released by Destrada, the center for consumer insights, again, adults are not in the mood to pursue degrees because things are changing so fast, but they are willing to skill up. And there’s a new norm where we need to constantly upgrade our skills.

It’s not just whatever we can get early in our lives, but we’re going to be challenged to keep up with the rate of change. And so we have to design on-ramps that build the confidence of adults. So many of the adults that we work with have very, very complicated lives. They may not have had a dynamite experience with education in the first go around.

And so bringing them back into education in an adult friendly way is super important. They may not have ever tried online education or even hybrid education, so that’s very intimidating. So how do you tiptoe adults back into that process? And then they have a lot of complicated life circumstances, especially last year.

My goodness. Our students called in, they’re now living out of their car because the fires in California rendered them homeless. And then of course the pandemic, their family members became sick or passed away or they were also sick. And that’s over and above the normal life situations of, you know, care for your children or getting pregnant and that deterring your education.

 So getting the family in shape through an on-ramp into education that is designed specific for adult, we found as an effective strategy.

[00:12:32] Kelly: Wow. Yeah, those stories are, I mean, I can only imagine, and especially in the world that they were trying to go into in terms of healthcare and all of the changes that were happening on top of it. So you talked a moment ago about the technology, sort of like that being one of the big changes through the pandemic for healthcare workers, as soon as we had to see this virtual, you know, my virtual doctor’s appointment.

Besides technology and that agility, what are the other top three skills for healthcare workers, that you’ve learned throughout the pandemic?

[00:13:08] Van: So in the past, you can go into a healthcare or medicine, for example, to become a doctor because you were interested in being of service to others, right? You were interested in the clinical skills and frankly you needed also the, kind of the human touch, interpersonal skills. And those were the primary reasons or drivers of your success in healthcare.

But if you talk to doctors and other healthcare practitioners now, what has happened is that the technology aptitude is becoming a factor. One of the biggest complaints post months into the pandemic is that both doctors and nurses and all the others who are supporting the patient, are spending a lot of time on tech support.

Because if you can’t get your zoom up and working or the data feeds working, then they can’t deliver that care. So comfort with technology is a new set of skills. And then the third area is actually data. Imagine how much data can be obtained on you through your mobile devices.

And then that data would then from your home, be exported to a doctor or someone, an analyst, somewhere else in a different location and your care team is looking at that data. So now all of a sudden, it’s not just about whether Kelly feels comfortable in the interactions with me, and I have the expertise to do that.

I have to be able to read Kelly’s data from a far and that may be a new member, not only a new member of the care team who’s really good in interpreting the data, but I also have to have some minimum literacy dealing with this type of new world of patient care.

[00:14:46] Kelly: Yeah, I wonder, we all tend to think of healthcare in the term, in the large scale. Hospitals, right? I’m thinking. Gosh, even hospitals are struggling right now in terms of amount of staff that they need with these specialized skillsets. How is this affecting though, these smaller or medium size doctor’s offices? The individual practices? Is that anything that kind of falls into the work that you’re doing?

[00:15:14] Van: So one of the biggest trends that happened in during the pandemic was we all closed our offices and everybody went home with. Companies from all types of industries, their CEO’s began looking at that big cost line item, which is facilities and began to wonder, Hmm do I really need to have these large investments in rent and facilities?

And it’s no different for healthcare providers. Hospitals are very expensive. So, you know, one of the areas you can expect more movement is, how do you do care in the home? How do you move more of that care to the home? Now, imagine the skillset that it takes for someone to provision that care.

All of a sudden, you’re not only doing those clinical skills, what is traditional healthcare skills. Now you also need like geek squad skills to be able to troubleshoot all the various devices that actually helped, you know, you can measure all sorts of things. Now they can just ship you a whole box with all these things that collect your data.

And then the third is there’s a cultural competence element. Now you’re like traipsing around in somebody’s home with all those dynamics of being in someone’s home. That combination of skill is very difficult to come about. Clinical for one, crossover with tech support, and then you have the cultural competence.

So you could imagine without some intentionality in growing that workforce, the whole industry whether it’s mom and pop doctor’s office, to large hospitals are going to find themselves really struggling with having workers who can do this skillset.

[00:16:59] Kelly: That’s really fascinating because of course I wasn’t even thinking of that as being sort of, but there’s so much more changes I think afoot it sounds like then where we’ve even experienced yet. I guess that’s not even surprising on one hand. Right? So let’s transition over into the book, such a fabulous, fabulous book.

Why a book? Why now?

[00:17:24] Van: it was time to write the book because the numbers, the numbers. If you’d look at the front page of the Washington Post, it talked about 10.9 million open jobs. While there’s 8.4 million unemployed Americans. So how can you have that many workers looking for work and that many employers looking for workers, you know, where is the friction in between that’s not creating a match?

 So I believe at this moment in time, we just need all hands on deck. All parties, whether you’re an employer, whether you’re a educator, a public policy maker, citizen, all of us need to have all hands on deck to match workers with the right skills for the right jobs.

How I structured my book, which is entitled “Workforce RX, Agile and Inclusive Strategies for Employers, Educators, and Workers in Unsettled Times.” It’s really around a set of challenges and solutions. So 10 chapters, 10 challenges and solutions. The first chapter is making the fire hose and the garden hose work together. It answers the question of many employers, like why doesn’t education deliver the workers that I need?

And one of the fundamental dynamic is that education is a firehose that blast out like graduates at 25 at a time. Because if the enrollment is less than 15, they have to actually cancel the class. There’s a scale that they have to work with. But employers, they drip out jobs, one z, two z, three z at a time. And so how do you actually begin to match the garden hose and the fire hose so that the two can work together?

And so solving that kind of problem, they’re already made strategies. And people do not have to start from scratch and the other big misconception for employers, but actually all parties is that they have to do it on their own. There is a whole network of partners, whole network of resources and key is to do what you do best.

And to do this work with other partners, it’s really a team sport rather than an individual sport.

[00:19:36] Kelly: First of all, I love that analogy of the hoses, I’m picturing. I think it’s just such a great way to put this, but also, I think such a fantastic call-out that this is not something that has to be done alone. You talk about something called the three legged stool. What is that? Can you describe it for us?

[00:19:55] Van: So Kelly. If an employer is able to transact for a talent, for example, put a posting up and they get what they need, then there’s no need to do workforce development. It’s only when the talent pool is shallow and you’re doing what I would consider posting and praying cause you’re unsure that there’s the diverse pool on the back end or there’s a quality pool on the backend or a diverse and quality pool on the backend.

That’s when you actually want to begin to do workforce development because there’s intentionality and involve, and it does take either time, resources or both. And again most companies make the mistake of thinking that they have to do it all alone right.

The effective workforce development model is one that is, I called the three legged stool. The first leg is the employer and the role of the employer is not to do everything, but to focus on what do they need, and articulating those hiring requirements and then hiring. The second leg is really a community-based organization or public workforce agency who can do a much better job going out into communities and sourcing the candidates against the specifications of the employer, including diversity.

So for example when I was back in in a company, the partner that worked with me from the community-based organization, like she would meet with individuals at the food court at the shopping mall, for example, because it was less intimidating for these individuals to meet there than to come to some formal building that could be very intimidating and she was able to source for us, much more diversity.

And the third leg is really the education. And the role of the educator is to close the gap between where the candidate pool is and what the employers needed. For example, in working with Fresno City College, they design a three month curriculum where they took the candidates through a set of academic curriculum in order to be ready for a preemployment test. And where most candidates ended up weak was actually in spatial reasoning. So they added quite a bit of curriculum around spatial reasoning so that the workers were more prepared.

The other part that my company needed because these jobs were very physical job, was physical conditioning. We had all these veterans in there, you would think they wouldn’t need physical conditioning. But they brought the equivalent of a PE teacher, a coach, and they design not only a set of exercises, but then they had everyone play soccer on a regular basis to improve their cardio condition. And as a result, they were able to close the gap.

Now I would love to just tell what I call my fish story on why you need the three legged stool. So we did all this when I was at my company of 20,000 because we were facing imminent retirement of 25 to 50% of our frontline workforce. And that’s the workforce that in the middle of the night if your power line goes down, this is the workforce that will be deployed to restore your power line. So very important, just like healthcare. So we did the three legged stool, and then we had the graduates go through the exact identical preemployment screens.

So no special processes at that point. Well, there was one young man whom the supervisors interacted with and we all thought he would be a great fit for the company. And for some reason, after the preemployment screens, he dropped off the list. And it was only because we were in this intentional workforce development program and learned about him, that we raised the question well, what happened to Alecki? It turns out when Alecki was 15 years old, he had gone fishing and caught a fish that was too small. That resulted in a ticket, which he did not pay, not surprising, I have a teenager as well. And that ticket went to court, he did not show up in court and that became a felony. Alecki was carrying a felony on his record and he did not even know it.

He would have been precluded from every significant energy sector job. And no employer would pause to say, hey Alecki, you have something on your record. Because they would just send the postcard of, hey thank you but we’ve had other better qualified candidates. So in this case, because we were in this workforce development program, we then asked our community partner to look into it, to work with the individual, to expunge their record, and then we were able to hire him and all was good after that.

But that’s an example of a sort of hidden talent, a talent that may have gone through the crack. And it’s only because we had the three legged stool, where we each did what we do best, and the company did not have to do that work.

But the partners readily were willing and able to do that work, that we were able to tap into that talent pool. So that’s an example of why the three legged stool is so powerful as a workforce development model.

[00:25:10] Kelly: That’s such a beautiful story cause I’m sure we can all imagine times, and especially now when folks are not being hired because of various barriers that are in place. So you mentioned, with this three legged stool, at least in my experience, it has traditionally been difficult to create these kinds of partnerships, especially between employers and higher education. Besides going by the book because everyone should do you have a couple of tips that you can share with us that might make that easier?

[00:25:47] Van: When I first started in education, there was a big gulf between the education and employers. Almost education keeping employers at bay, but at this moment in time, given the state of the country and even all the updates in public policy, there’s really a call for bringing the two worlds together to work effectively together.

And there are many strategies outlined in the book that led to this moment in time. Now, large employers, they have the HR department, they have the resources to be able to do this workforce development. Probably harder would be what can the small and medium employers do. And here, I think once again, just like I’ve mentioned as an ecosystem of the willing.

Consider, what is it that you could do together that you can’t do alone? So what we found was that for example, in Fresno, the central valley area of California, but also the inland empire of California, small manufacturers were struggling with their workforce needs. But on their own, they couldn’t do much.

So how do you then begin aggregating, building up to alliances, and industry sector councils where you’re amassing volume between the needs of individual employers so that collectively you can match the firehose, right? Basically you’re adding up all the garden hoses in order to match the volume needed by education to produce a fire hose.

That has been very effective in a number of areas. And it should be by industry, The themes and commonalities within industry. So aggregating employers, especially small medium employers to do that work together. And then on the education side, no one education institution, no one organization can solve all the problems.

Each institution has different interests, competencies, and resources. So together, which players can step up for that particular need. And so it’s really like a marketplace between education and within employers. And as an employer, you just need to know that there are more and more institutions in your backyard than you may think.

Like in the Bay area there’s actually 28 community colleges. Not the one that’s nearest to you, but 28. That’s just community colleges alone. So think about all the education resources that are physical, but also virtual, which has been exponentially grown during the pandemic and between all of that, you can get the education solutions that you want.

And this is one of the strategies that Futuro Health has really leveraged. When we are trying to skill up existing healthcare workers for tele-health skills, we actually looked around the whole country and we found a program that was tested, tried, and true and fully online in the University of Delaware.

We brought that to California. So I think this is a very challenge moment in time for higher education because people are not looking just to the backyard, but all around the nation for what are good solutions.

[00:28:58] Kelly: That’s really just amazing. I love that story of just looking, you know, sort of thinking outside of the box in terms of what resources you can pull from. It doesn’t only have to be in your backyard. I think that’s a really strong So I know we’re coming close to the end of our time here today, Van, and I love to leave with one sort of personal question and I’d love to hear over this time of the pandemic, what is the one thing that you’ve learned that’s been most surprising or inspiring to you?

[00:29:34] Van: Ooh, that’s a hard one.

Like everybody, I’ve found that we could actually do more things collaboratively and virtually then I think any of us thought. On the other hand, 18 months plus into the pandemic, when we got together back in a in-person retreat of my team, we got so much done in person as well. So I think it does magnify sort of the value of the fully virtual, but also the fully in-person for me.

[00:30:03] Kelly: That’s great. Well again, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for sharing more about Futuro Health and your new book. If you guys are interested in Van’s book, again the full title “Workforce RX: Agile and Inclusive Strategies for Employers, Educators, and Workers in Unsettled Times.”, it is available on Amazon. We’re going to link it with in the podcast and on the website.

You can also follow Van on LinkedIn or on Twitter @workforcevan. That’s V A N. And if you’re interested in learning more about Futuro Health, head over to Futurohealth.org. Is there anywhere else that you like to hang out on social media on that we should know about?

[00:30:50] Van: I believe if they are interested in staying up to date with thought leaders who are working to future-proof our workforce, anywhere they listen to podcasts please look up Workforce RX, and that’s a podcast that I host.

[00:31:03] Kelly: Thank you so much for reminding me. I almost forgot to mention that. Yes, definitely go and check out the podcast. I also listened to that podcast by the way. I love it. But thank you again so much for joining us. I hope you all have a wonderful day.

[00:31:17] Van: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Kelly.

[00:31:19] Kelly: Thanks for tuning in to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, a Growth Network Podcast production. If any part of this episode resonated with you, we would love for you to share it with a friend or colleague who might feel the same. Feel free to reach out to me at Kelly Ryan Bailey on social and learn more about the events and initiatives we have coming up at skillsbaby.com.

Thanks again for spending some time with me and most importantly, have a great day.