Work Forces

Work Forces

Seeking to optimize your organization for the future of work and learning? Join workforce and education strategists Julian Alssid and Kaitlin LeMoine as they speak with the innovators who are shaping the future of workforce and career preparation. Together, they will unpack the big problems these individuals are solving and discuss the strategies and tactics that really work. This bi-weekly show is for practitioners and policymakers looking for practical workforce and learning solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

  1. 1d ago

    Alexandra Simon: Building High-Quality Youth Apprenticeship Pathways

    Alexandra Simon, Senior Policy Analyst with the Center on Education and Labor at New America and a key contributor to the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA), discusses what it takes to build youth apprenticeship programs that are rigorous, equitable, and ready to scale. Drawing on her experience leading technical assistance for U.S. Department of Labor Youth Apprenticeship Readiness Grants and her recent report "Employers Report Four Indirect Benefits of Youth Apprenticeship," Alexandra reframes youth apprenticeship not just as a talent pipeline strategy, but as an organizational development investment that strengthens managers, renews employee engagement, and improves training systems across the board. The conversation explores how youth apprenticeship differs from internships and other work-based learning experiences, why the field looks so different from state to state and community to community, and what it takes to bring employers to the table. Alexandra also walks through PAYA's five quality principles for high-quality youth apprenticeship, makes the case for starting small and building toward programs that prepare young people for both college and career, and offers practical guidance for educators, employers, and policymakers who want to expand access to youth apprenticeships in their own communities. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Kaitlin LeMoine: Welcome to Season 7 of Work Forces. As we head into a new season and a new school year, we're excited to kick off the season by further exploring a theme that has been running through our recent podcast conversations: the growing recognition that career preparation can't wait until the end of a student's journey. Whether we're talking about gateway courses in higher education or career and technical education at the secondary level, there is increasing momentum around the idea that young people need earlier, more scaffolded exposure to the world of work. Julian Alssid: That's right, Kaitlin. And yet, as promising as that momentum is, the field is far from uniform. Youth apprenticeship, one of the most rigorous models we have for connecting young people to careers, is taking many forms. And employers, even those who want to engage, don't always see a clear path to doing so. So the question isn't just what are the various ways to engage learners in early career preparation. It's how we build pathways that are coherent enough to scale, rigorous enough to mean something, and compelling enough to bring employers to the table. Kaitlin LeMoine: And all of this brings us to our guest today. Alexandra Simon is a senior policy analyst with the Center on Education and Labor at New America, where she supports youth transitions from high school to post-secondary education and careers. Alexandra contributes to the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship, known as PAYA, through research, technical assistance, and strategic communications, and has spent her career working at the intersection of youth apprenticeship, work-based learning, and career pathways. Before joining New America, she led technical assistance for US Departments of Education and Labor initiatives focused on youth apprenticeship, work-based learning, and career pathways. And she began her career as a high school Spanish teacher. Alexandra, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us to kick off our new season. Alexandra Simon: It's a pleasure to be here. Julian Alssid: So glad you've taken the time to join us. And to kick things off, if you will, tell us in your own words about your background and the path that brought you to your current role at New America. Alexandra Simon: After teaching in several states and overseas, I transitioned into the nonprofit space. And I had the opportunity to lead the technical assistance for US Department of Labor's Youth Apprenticeship Readiness Grants, which kicked off in 2020 and ran through 2024. And that's where I really became passionate about youth apprenticeship. I like to say I drank the apprenticeship Kool-Aid. Since then, my work has expanded to include not only youth apprenticeship, but also more broadly, career and technical education, work-based learning, dual enrollment, and other pathways work that really help young people successfully transition from high school to college and careers. And today at New America, I support the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship, PAYA for short, through research, technical assistance, strategic communications, and also working with grantees who are implementing the boots-on-the-ground youth apprenticeships. Kaitlin LeMoine: Youth apprenticeship, I feel like it can be used interchangeably with other terms or feel similar to other terms we often hear in this space, like internships or work-based learning or pre-apprenticeships. Can you help us understand what youth apprenticeships are, what makes them distinct, and where PAYA and the definitions created through PAYA fit within that broader landscape? Alexandra Simon: So I'm going to start with the broadest term here, which is work-based learning. And that really spans a continuum from things like short-term experiences, like job shadowing, or maybe having guest speakers come to schools from employers to talk about their organizations or certain jobs. And then that continuum goes all the way to more sustained activities like internships. And then on the far side, apprenticeships, which was a really good lead-in earlier to explain how rigorous and aligned with occupations apprenticeships can be. So let's look from the perspective of a young person. An internship for a young person, I think the biggest distinction or confusion becomes between an internship and apprenticeship. So I'm going to break that down. An internship's really a chance to explore a career and gain experience. But an apprenticeship is a pathway into a career, a specific occupation where you're hired from the start. You receive structured training, you have a mentor that you're paired with to help you learn this occupation, and you build the skills needed for that occupation while earning a wage. Oftentimes you hear this term "earn and learn." So you're immediately an employee of the company and you're also learning on the job through on-the-job training. And I think this really matters because apprenticeships and internships are designed to achieve different goals, right? If an employer simply wants to identify some promising talent, an internship might be enough. But if they're struggling to find workers with specialized, hands-on skills, an apprenticeship really allows them to grow that talent themselves. And so I want people to think of internships and apprenticeships as complementary tools, not competing ones, but they are very different in that way. And so I think our work at New America, we have defined what a quality youth apprenticeship is. And I think our version of youth apprenticeship is very specific because youth apprenticeship from PAYA's perspective should start when a youth is between the ages of 16 to 18, like high school age. A lot of youth apprenticeships do start in high school. Some of them might start right at the tail end of high school, so you're identifying that you're going to go into a youth apprenticeship, but you're maybe not starting it until right towards the end of high school for various reasons. Julian Alssid: So to dig deeper into apprenticeships then, you recently wrote a report about the indirect benefits of youth apprenticeship that employers experience and gain from participating in youth apprenticeship programs. Great if you would walk us through that report, the key findings, and what surprised you the most? Alexandra Simon: So the findings from the report, what they really do is reframe youth apprenticeship not just as a talent pipeline strategy, which is how we often look at it, but also as an organizational development strategy for employers. I would say the biggest takeaways from our research were that employers defined benefits that went far beyond filling that future pipeline. And for this report, we did interview six employers across IT and advanced manufacturing; they were training youth apprentices in those two sectors and occupations. And while they definitely valued developing this future talent, we heard from employers about how youth apprenticeship actually made their existing organizations stronger. And so there's not a lot done on youth apprenticeship specifically. There's a lot of return on investment or ROI studies on apprenticeship more broadly, but we really wanted to dig into indirect benefits that are harder to quantify. So that's what we did for this study, and we really identified four major indirect benefits from the interviews that we conducted with employers. And I'll start off with how youth apprenticeship really renewed employee engagement. We had mentors and also just co-workers who worked alongside the youth apprentices describe a real sense of pride and purpose in helping young people succeed. It created what m

    Alexandra Simon: Building High-Quality Youth Apprenticeship Pathways

  2. Aug 4

    Work Forces Rewind: Haley Glover: Building Employer Upskilling Strategies

    Haley Glover, Senior Director of UpSkill America at the Aspen Institute, discusses how businesses can effectively upskill their workforce in an AI-driven economy. Drawing on her experience at Lumina Foundation, Amazon, and the Aspen Institute, Glover explains how upskilling has shifted from talent acquisition crisis management to strategic workforce planning focused on validated skills. She details findings from The Upskilling Playbook, emphasizing that successful AI adoption requires thoughtful, worker-focused training aligned with business strategy—not just technology purchases driven by peer pressure. The conversation also explores the All Learning Counts initiative, which advocates for recognizing skills regardless of where they were acquired, and new research on internship programs showing how companies find value through talent pipeline development, retention, and innovation from fresh thinking. Glover addresses distinct challenges facing small versus large employers and offers practical guidance for learners, educators, advocates, and employers to build resilient upskilling programs that withstand economic shocks. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforce consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. Julian Alssid: We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Julian Alssid: As we continue our summer break before returning with a new season later in August, we're revisiting our conversation with Haley Glover of UpSkill America. With AI reshaping jobs faster than most organizations can respond, and so much in flux around how we fund and support workforce development, this conversation feels more relevant than ever. Haley discusses how businesses can effectively upskill their workforce in an ever-changing, AI-driven economy, while recognizing this is an ongoing and unfolding conversation. We hope you enjoy it. Here's our episode with Haley Glover. Julian Alssid: Kaitlin, so much of the conversation around the future of work focuses on the what—what skills are needed, what jobs are disappearing. But the harder question, and the one that really determines success, is the how. How do businesses actually help their existing employees develop the skills they need to succeed in a changing economy? Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely. While we know the need for and importance of upskilling initiatives, actually building an effective system that helps workers grow and advance is a really complex undertaking for employers. Julian Alssid: Right. It's one thing to agree that upskilling is necessary; it's another to have a playbook that works for both the employee and the bottom line. To create that playbook, we need guidance from leaders who understand both the policy landscape and the operational reality of business. Kaitlin LeMoine: Exactly. We need that along with insight into researched best practices across industries. And luckily, today we're joined by someone who brings that multi-sector perspective to the table. Today we're speaking with Haley Glover, Senior Director of UpSkill America, a national initiative of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program. UpSkill America drives research and efforts that promote employer-led education and training to help workers advance and help businesses compete. Julian Alssid: Prior to this role, Haley was Senior Program Manager at Amazon, where she led college programming for the company's Career Choice team. And before that, she served as a Strategy Director at Lumina Foundation—which is where we first met Haley—leading efforts to reduce racial disparities in credential attainment. Haley holds a bachelor's degree from Franklin College, a Master of Liberal Arts from St. John's College Graduate Institute, and an MPA from Syracuse University. Haley, welcome to Work Forces, we're thrilled to have you with us. Haley Glover: Thanks, guys. Good morning. Julian Alssid: Please tell us, in your own words, about your background and what led you to your role at Aspen Institute. Haley Glover: In the spirit of time, I will give you the short journey instead of the meandering one. But fun story: you mentioned I was at Lumina Foundation, and I was there for a very long time—about 11 and a half, 12 years. I not only led the work in my last four years at Lumina focusing on eliminating racial disparities and that kind of thing, I also led portfolios focused on what we called "employer mobilization," which in my glib moments I described as getting employers to do stuff. But it was really focused on understanding and motivating how employers can take their considerable resources, influence, and that unique positioning in employees' lives to mobilize toward the credential attainment mission. Back in 2015, when UpSkill started, I actually was one of the first funders of UpSkill at Aspen and helped try to kick that off back in the day. So my time with UpSkill started right at the beginning. Obviously, the initiative changed a lot over a decade, along with the economy, the workforce, and all of the things. But that is how I found myself here about three and a half years ago. This idea, this question about how employers can not only benefit from investment in skill development but create benefits for individuals, their companies, society, and our country—that has been a throughline of work that I've been doing for quite a long time. Between my past life as an educator, working in economic development, working in nonprofits, government, and philanthropy, as well as the private sector, that's been the river running through my work: trying to blend the streams and get more people to think very critically about how we leverage all of the power we need to get people the skills they need to thrive. Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for that overview and that story of how you got to where you are. I'm curious to know: how has the focus of your work through UpSkill America evolved over the last few years? You mentioned all the changes that are occurring—what do you see as the primary focus, and how do you see that shifting? Haley Glover: That is a fantastic question. I think there's a very simple answer, which is that the economy we're in in January 2026 is not the economy we were in when I came to UpSkill back in the summer of 2022. Three and a half years ago, employers were absolutely just falling over themselves to acquire and retain talent. The question of the time was: how do I find people with the right skills? How do I keep people with the right skills? How do I get the mass that I need in order to proceed? That is not the question now. Now, I think employers are really leaning into: what skills and competencies do I actually need to not only fill tasks and roles that I have right now, but to take me into the future? How do I not just retain talent, but retain the right talent in particular roles that are going to have strategic value for me going forward? How do I create robust pipelines that guarantee that I, as an employer, am not going to be wasting time, energy, and effort on the upfront acquisition? How do I build my workforce strategy muscles in order to understand with much more nuance and robustness this idea of what I'm going to need in the future? So, it's pivoted from a "fire on my front line right now" focus three or four years ago to a need to think much more critically about what's down the road and into the future. That's been huge. From the work that UpSkill is doing, we've leaned more heavily into this idea of getting much more specific and intentional. With the addition of AI—which is both a positive in that it can help people do things with less time, energy, and effort, but also a complicator—you've got this skills validation issue. I just read a piece the other day about a $600 billion resume fraud issue, which is really asking the question about skills validation. We are trying to make sure that (1) we get people to understand and be recognized for the things that they know and are able to do, regardless of where they acquired them. We've been calling this movement "All Learning Counts" for a very long time. It is this idea that it shouldn't matter whether you attended the most prestigious elite institution or you gained your skills through work. If you've got the same skills, you should be competing in the same way. What we do right now is we conflate a lot of different things with being "better" at something instead of really understanding what people can really bring to the table. So this idea of skills validation has become a much more important part of our work because it addresses both sides of the coin: employers need validated skills, and people need to understand their own skill set. A lot of people will go through education programs, training programs, and work experiences and not develop what we call this metacognition of what they know. Knowing what you know and knowing what you're able to do can be a very powerful, empowering scenario for an individual. It can also be the thing that sets you apart in an interview or a process because you can say, "I know what I know, and here's how I know it, and here's what I did to show it." We're also trying to really help the emplo

    Work Forces Rewind: Haley Glover: Building Employer Upskilling Strategies

  3. Jul 21

    Work Forces Rewind: Mitchell Stevens on Building a Learning Society

    Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, discusses the urgent transition from a "schooled society" focused on credentials to a true "learning society" that recognizes and supports learning across the entire lifespan. Stevens explains how the traditional three-stage model of education, work, and retirement is becoming obsolete as Americans move toward 100-year lives amid rapid technological change brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He argues that legacy school structures that are built for durability and stability cannot by themselves prepare people for ongoing adaptation, emphasizing instead that learning happens everywhere: at home, work, and play. The conversation explores how declining fertility rates mean societies must rely on older workers, requiring a fundamental reimagining of human capital investment beyond children and young adults. Stevens calls for new conversations about who is responsible for lifelong employability and offers practical guidance for parents, young people and voters alike. Transcript Kaitlin LeMoine: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education industry and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.  Happy Summer! Julian and I are taking some time to  recharge before launching our next podcast season. In the meantime, we're excited to revisit two conversations from this past season that remain relevant and top of mind for us in our own work.  Our first Work Forces "rewind" is our podcast conversation with Mitchell Stevens. During this conversation, Mitchell shared his work at the Stanford Center on Longevity and discussed the need for a transition from a "schooled society" focused on credentials to a "learning society" that supports learning across the entire lifespan. We hope you enjoy this discussion as much as we did, and we'll be back with new episodes soon!   Welcome back. You know, Julian, we spend a lot of time on this show talking about the future of work, but there is a massive variable in that equation that we don't discuss enough, the reality that we are all likely to live much longer lives and need to learn continuously along the way. Julian Alssid: It's so true. Kaitlin, we're moving toward what researchers call the 100 year life. The old three stage model where you learn in your 20s, work for 40 years, and then retire is rapidly becoming obsolete. We can't rely on a one and done dose of education, and need to fundamentally rethink how we access and engage in learning experiences across our lives.  Kaitlin LeMoine: Exactly. We need to move from what our guest today calls a school society focused on credentials and early life education to a true learning society where learning is ongoing and achieved through many contexts over one's life. Our guest is leading the initiative to define what that society can look like, mapping out a future where learning work and leisure intersect throughout the entire lifespan. Julian Alssid: Our guest today is Mitchell Stevens, Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University. He convenes the Pathways Network and studies history, finance and politics of post secondary education in the United States and worldwide. Mitchell is the author of award winning studies on home education and selective admissions, and his most recent books are Remaking College: the Changing Ecology of Higher Education and Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in the Global Era. Kaitlin LeMoine: Mitchell is also co director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, where he convenes the Learning Society initiative. This effort brings together leaders from various sectors to imagine a learning ecosystem that supports all of us across longer and multifaceted life. He's written scholarly articles for variety of academic journals and editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. We are so thrilled to have you join us today. Mitchell, welcome to the workforces podcast. Mitchell Stevens: Thank you for having me.  Julian Alssid: Yes Mitchell, welcome, and we've talked a little bit about your background, but we'd like to have you tell us about your background and what led you to co directing the Center on Longevity.  Mitchell Stevens: I would say one of the formative experiences for me, intellectually, as is often the case for academics, was their doctoral work back in the 90s, I studied the home education movement and drove my multi-used car all over the Chicagoland suburbs to talk with men and women who were making, at the time, a very radical decision to remove their children from school and teach them at home. One of the big lessons that home schoolers taught me and now many others, is that the rhythms of conventional schooling that so many of us take for granted are highly demanding and often fairly rigid structures. They are not very flexible for the needs of particular people or even the rhythms of complicated lives. That's really what planted the seeds for what we're currently calling the limitations of a schooled society, one in which not only education and learning, but many social rewards, good jobs, social status, looks of approval from parents and grandparents, is really tied to educational credentials, and especially in the face of very dramatic and rapid changes in the character of work and technological change coming to question whether legacy school structures themselves are the best way to prepare people for ever more complicated futures. Kaitlin LeMoine: So there are many places to jump into based on that explanation. We appreciate, we appreciate you kind of giving a sense of what has led you to this work. I guess one place I'd love to take the conversation to start is we recognize, within the last year, your work on the Learning Society within the Center on Longevity has really taken off. We'd love to hear more about the goals of that initiative and what you've sought to accomplish this year, and where you're where you see it headed. Mitchell Stevens: How we get from home schooling to longevity, I guess, is the second half of that question that I elided the first time around. I came into the Stanford Center on Longevity, just as a professor at Stanford around 2017. Someone encouraged me to go because their assemblies were so good. I was in my mid 50s. I'd been at Stanford for just a couple of years, and I was, frankly, kind of blown away by the intellectual breadth of the conversations of that organization. First of all, we call it the Center on Longevity, not the Center on Aging, right? Aging is a frowny face, right? As in anti-aging and preventing aging and denying aging. Longevity is a strong net positive. It's a gift that the 20th century gave all of us. In fact, Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, likes to point out that lifespan grew in the 20th century more than it ever had in the entire previous centuries of human history combined. Very large change, say, additional 30 years of life over that decade, and it's happened very quickly. Societies and cultures have not had time to adapt to this gift. What have most societies done? In fact, all societies on earth at present, we parked those additional years in old age. Old age is the most expensive and arguably least fun part of the life course. It's when our bodies are most frail and when our minds are most fragile as well. So the goal of the Center on Longevity, and in fact, a global longevity movement, is to make functional adulthood as long as possible, keep old age short, but extend functional adulthood so that our minds and bodies can enjoy life and contribute to the well being of others for long, as long as we possibly can. And let's say also this is not the Silicon Valley live forever longevity. That's not really the game that the Center on Longevity is playing. We are trying to think about longevity as a civic gift that all of us should be able to enjoy, and in fact, that we need to be able to take advantage of, because also of declining fertility. Around the world, except for Sub Saharan Africa, are experiencing net declines in fertility. So that means that the men and women we're going to need to rely on for economic prosperity and civic health, are going to be older. They're going to be more mature, and so we need to sort of rethink pretty much all of our institutions in order to enable those older men and women to make the best contributions they can to their own lives, to their families, and to their societies. Another tie to the homeschooling movement, however, is that the longevity movement has developed a bunch of terms heuristics to make sense of transitions that we used to think were the sole purview of childhood. One of my colleagues refers to, for example, there's adolescence, but Barbara Waxman calls it middlessence. Middlessence is the transitions that adults make between different life stages. Michael Clinton argues that we don't retire, we should instead rewire, right, so the idea that longer lives require but also allow us to change our lives in fairly fundamental and substantial ways,

    Work Forces Rewind: Mitchell Stevens on Building a Learning Society

  4. Jul 7

    Clare Bertrand: Shaping College Board's Role in Career-Connected Learning

    Clare Bertrand, Executive Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at College Board, discusses how one of education's most recognized organizations is expanding its mission beyond college admissions to embrace career-connected learning as a core priority. Clare shares the story behind AP Career Kickstart, a new suite of courses co-designed with IBM, CompTIA, and Cisco that allows students to earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials before graduation, with the first two courses, AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity, launching nationally in fall 2026. The conversation explores how deep partnerships with chambers of commerce across 41 states have shaped the design of these courses, why employers are hungry for a trusted, nationally recognized signal of durable skills, and how College Board is thinking about scale in a way that honors local labor market context. Clare also reflects on the acquisition of Teamship, the role of intermediaries in connecting employers to schools, and what it will take for educators, employers, and policymakers to become true forces in expanding access to career-connected learning for all students. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces Podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. As we close out the academic year and take some time to reflect on the past year of our work at Work Forces, we're struck by a theme that keeps showing up across our work: the integration of academic and career preparation across learning experiences, from K-12 through higher education. Julian Alssid: That's right. Listeners may remember our recent conversation with Dan Gonzalez when his company, District C, was building project-based learning experiences that put students to work on real business problems. Since then, District C became part of College Board, an organization most of us associate with the SAT and Advanced Placement exams. That shift is part of a broader initiative asking what it means to prepare a student for both college and career, not as two separate tracks, but as one continuous throughline. Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to our guest today. Clare Bertrand, Executive Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at College Board, leads the chamber, intermediary, and philanthropic partnerships behind the development of AP Career Kickstart, a new suite of courses co-designed with IBM, CompTIA, and Cisco that lets students earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials before graduation. Before joining College Board, Clare was a senior leader at Jobs for the Future, where she helped build one of the field's first career navigation tech products. She also co-founded a neurodiversity intermediary focused on building more inclusive talent pipelines for higher-performing companies. Clare, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us on the podcast today. Clare Bertrand: Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. And I love starting a conversation that references Dan Gonzalez and Teamship. Dan's one of my favorite people at College Board, and I'm so thrilled for Teamship to be part of our portfolio. So thank you for that. I'm just very excited to get into it. Julian Alssid: It was great to interview Dan, and the flow is obvious and will become more so as we have this conversation. So to kick us off, tell us in your own words about your background and the path that led you to your current role at College Board. Clare Bertrand: So as you mentioned, I was a senior leader at JFF before joining College Board. There I directed federal initiatives and innovation partnerships, and I launched a career and technical navigation product that was used by Job Corps and really focused on young people who were overage and undercredited in high school — what they used to call opportunity youth, but really students who are disconnected from education and the workforce. That role gave me a 360-degree view of the systems and actors that inform how students get to and through school and into the workplace as young adults. And as mentioned, I did co-found a talent intermediary focused on helping companies hire and retain neurodiverse individuals, working mainly with the cybersecurity industry. That experience helped me understand the gap between employer and worker expectations, which was very real in that work. When I came to College Board, I authored our career and partnership strategy to position College Board and its programs within the broader education and workforce ecosystem, to really help expand our reach to more students and ensure that we clear a path for students to thrive in whatever they choose to do after high school. So now I lead partnerships, and that really focuses on the launch of our AP Career Kickstart courses, which you all mentioned and we'll get into a little later. I'm in regular conversation with chambers of commerce, companies, schools, national and local intermediaries, and philanthropic partners. College Board is in new rooms and new conversations, and it's a really exciting time. And finally, I'll mention that my husband has been teaching in the classroom for 25 years, so that keeps me very grounded in the everyday world of teaching and learning. Kaitlin LeMoine: College Board has long been associated with traditional college prep and AP courses. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the decision to expand into career-connected learning with AP Career Kickstart as a core offering, and what's driving that. Clare Bertrand: It's very true — college is in our name. We've been working to help students get into college for over a hundred years. And to be clear, college is still the right choice for many students, but it isn't the path for all students. Given that we're a mission-driven nonprofit, we know that we can do better to reach more kids. Our CEO thinks of our mission in three ways: we want to help students feel that their work is relevant, especially the work they're doing in high school; expand our programs to reach more students; and ensure that all students are ready for the future of their choice — whether that's a four-year college, a two-year college, apprenticeship, or going straight to work. We really want them to be prepared for that. AP Career Kickstart lives at the center of all three. Advanced Placement, which has been around for seventy years, is a college-level course that confers college credit, and we save students about three billion dollars in tuition every year. I love that statistic. Our new AP Career Kickstart courses are built with AP's thoughtful design process — they're built with faculty and industry at the table, which is quite new for us, and are connected to in-demand occupations. Our first two courses launching this fall are AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity. We want students to have more choice, and we want to give employers stronger signals of readiness — the same thing we do for universities and colleges, but now at scale for career. So we're tackling both a skills gap issue and a validation gap. Students who have these skills sometimes can't articulate them, and employers aren't sure what signal to trust outside of degrees and certifications. College Board, we feel, is uniquely positioned to help fix this. We're already thinking of ourselves as a trusted validator of career readiness, and we believe we can provide the same signal for career that we've long provided for college readiness. Employers and industry are at the table, and the goal here is simple: at the end of the day, we want to end the artificial divide between students who are going to college and students who are going into careers. Students deserve both, and they're ready for both. A lot of our students work while they're in school, and students want to figure out what's right for them rather than be put on a very narrow path. Julian Alssid: Clare, you've spent a lot of time meeting with chambers of commerce across the country to help design AP Career Kickstart. What have you been hearing from them and their employer members, and how has that shaped what you're building? Clare Bertrand: You say "chambers of commerce" and you may have seen a big smile come across my face. I never in my career thought I'd love chambers of commerce so much. Even though I've been working in the education-to-workforce ecosystem for over twenty years, I'd actually never worked with chambers before. I've had the pleasure of overseeing an initiative with the US Chamber of Commerce, which has been a great partner for College Board. The US Chamber has actually endorsed both AP Business and AP Cybersecurity. The initiative we launched together is called Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce, and we invited chambers to help us prepare AP courses and be part of the Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce Coalition. Over 70 chambers in 41 states responded to support the courses and help us raise awareness across the country. Over the last 18 months or so I've been working with these chambers — listening to them, visiting them, presenting for them — and I've been really impressed by how embedded in their commu

    Clare Bertrand: Shaping College Board's Role in Career-Connected Learning

  5. Jun 23

    Michael Herrera: Career-Connected Learning in Action

    Michael Herrera, Ed.D., Executive Director of Upper Bucks County Technical School and Vice President of Region 1 on the national board of the Association for Career and Technical Education, discusses how high-quality career and technical education connects students' interests to real economic impact. Herrera shares striking results from his school's cooperative education program, including students earning over one million dollars through paid co-op experiences and 93% of participating students receiving full-time job offers from their co-op employers after graduation. He explains how the school's relationships with more than 250 industry partners keep curriculum aligned with current and emerging fields. The conversation explores his distinctive approach to treating language as an economic asset, crediting students' bilingual abilities to open doors in healthcare, law enforcement, and manufacturing, as well as his work building employability skills alongside technical and academic instruction. Herrera makes the case that career-connected learning should be a right for every student, not the exception, and offers a vision for how educators, employers, and policymakers can work together to expand access to high-quality CTE nationwide. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.  As we head into summer, we find ourselves reflecting on the school year that is winding down and anticipating the one that is right around the corner yet again. In so many of our conversations on this podcast and in our consulting work, we talk about workforce development and career readiness from the vantage points of higher education, employers, and training organizations. And today we're turning our attention to career and technical education programs in the K-12 space that are preparing young people for the world of work. Julian Alssid: That's right, Kaitlin. And it is striking how much innovation is happening at the individual school level, often quietly and without enough recognition. CTE has certainly come a long way from the vocational education of a generation ago. And today's most effective programs are building career pathways, embedding work-based learning, and meeting students where they are to open doors to economic mobility. Kaitlin LeMoine: And this brings us to our guest today. Michael Herrera is the executive director of Upper Bucks County Technical School in Pennsylvania and vice president of Region One on the national board of the Association for Career and Technical Education, or ACTE. He's a recognized leader in career-connected learning and has led initiatives that expand work-based learning, industry-recognized credentials, and employer-aligned pathways that open doors to economic mobility for high school students. Michael, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you here with us today. Michael Herrera: It's a privilege and honor. Thank you so much for having me here today. Julian Alssid: So Michael, to kick us off, please tell us about your background and your dual roles both as executive director of your CTE school and as vice president of Region One on the ACTE board. Michael Herrera: I'd be glad to. As mentioned, proud executive director of Upper Bucks County Technical School. I also proudly serve on the ACTE Region One Board of Directors for my Association for Career and Technical Education. I become increasingly passionate about career-connected learning because I see firsthand what happens when students understand what they're learning and how it connects to their future. Our theme is from interest to impact. Whether it's an industry credential, work-based learning experience, apprenticeship, college pathway, or an employment opportunity, students become far more engaged when learning has purpose. At UBCTS, we serve 900 students across 23 career pathways, technical programs, and our focus is helping students develop the skills, experiences, and confidence needed to thrive in a rapidly changing economy. Kaitlin LeMoine: And Michael, just a little bit more on your background, you've been at this work for some time, correct? You've been in this role for some time and leading this work for many years. Michael Herrera: I have over two decades in career and technical education. Kaitlin LeMoine: So drawing on your background, this experience, these many years in this space, when you think about career and technical education, what does high-quality career-connected learning look like in practice? And what role does on-the-job and work-based learning play in your model? You mentioned it in your intro here, but would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that and walk us through some examples. Michael Herrera: Let me work backwards. Our students left—we had a senior ceremony last week. Kaitlin LeMoine: Congratulations. Michael Herrera: Thank you. Our students earned over one million dollars through a nationally recognized school-to-work program. That's the impact. Our students worked over 67,000 hours just during the school day. It does not include nights and weekends, as that number will far exceed that. That's the power for me for career and technical education. We had 110 industry partners that shared, and 93% of our students were offered full-time employment. So all of our students left with industry-recognized credentials and they left with a lot of pride. There should be pride in the dignity of work right now in our society. I firmly believe that career and technical education builds stronger individuals, families, and communities. And that's the power of CTE and career-connected learning. It gives people hope. I believe that this provides socioeconomic mobility. Many of our students, whether they have an IEP or come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, this opportunity gets them on an equal playing field. And it all starts with our interests. We use the term here at Upper Bucks, "ikigai"—purpose, passion. When, according to NPR, 68% of adults hate their job, that's a problem. We have a critical skills gap. So we like to really hope and instill what makes that student excited. What makes them go out, work those hours, and have that pride. And ikigai for us is what the world needs, what you love, what makes you money. When I started in Career Tech Ed years ago, we asked students, why do you go to school? And the answer was always to learn, which we are all lifelong learners, but without that purpose and that passion and that desire, that spark is not there. And what we do here at Upper Bucks in career-connected learning, we connect a student's education with the workforce. Julian Alssid: So just as a follow up, Michael, since students are coming in and may not have a whole lot of experience and knowledge about the workforce, how do you even introduce them to the different possibilities and begin to help them find areas they'd like to explore? Michael Herrera: We are bringing students in as early as first grade through our summer camps because our students have the experience, they have the skills and the aptitude, but may not necessarily have the interest. So exposing them to the benefits of what we offer, what the world needs, what's going to give them an opportunity to become stronger individuals and build stronger communities is just opening the doors, starting as first graders, working with our sending schools, helping them find their interests and their aptitudes is critical for us. At the same time, what we've really done was we did our best to communicate that. As you mentioned, vocational career and technical education can no longer be the best-kept secret. During COVID, when a lot of the world was shutting down, career and technical education accelerated. We are the frontline workers. We're the workers that are going to keep the economy growing. And it was at that time, in order to create a COVID safety plan, when we placed our students on our school-to-work program, we invited the parents, we invited the mentors, and we met at the businesses. That became our signing day. So what we've done is we've also put that on social media and shown the importance, no different than an athlete or any other type of signing day. And so we wanted to identify it, celebrate it, and then replicate it. We've grown since then, and now we place a banner: "We employ a UBCTS student". So when we talk about the return on investment with education and our community members are driving by over a hundred businesses that are hiring our students, they're seeing the firsthand knowledge of career and technical education. And they're seeing the partnership that we have with business and industry to help guide, build those stronger students and communities. Kaitlin LeMoine: Michael, you mentioned in discussing the recent graduation of some of your learners, your 110 industry partners. I would love to hear a little bit more. I mean, that's a lot of industry partners. Can you talk a little bit about how you've gone about building out those partnerships and what are different models through which learners engage with those industry partners? Michael Herrera: I think it's a

    Michael Herrera: Career-Connected Learning in Action

  6. Jun 9

    Laura DaVinci and Robert McGuire: The Career Readiness Imperative in Gateway Courses

    Laura DaVinci, Director of Every Learner Everywhere, and Robert McGuire, managing editor and content strategist, discuss their new report, The Career Readiness Imperative in Gateway Courses, which makes the case that career readiness belongs at the start of a student's college experience, not the end. Drawing on interviews with 17 practitioners and a review of more than 40 white papers, they trace an emerging trend of colleges and universities embedding career readiness into introductory and general education courses rather than treating it as a capstone activity. The conversation explores why gateway courses represent a unique opportunity to reach every admitted student, how digital learning tools are enabling faculty to make career connections without redesigning their courses from scratch, and what a practical playbook looks like for both institutional leaders and classroom faculty. DaVinci and McGuire also highlight the NACE competencies as a ready-made bridge between academic objectives and employer expectations, and offer concrete strategies for building faculty momentum through learning communities, fellowships, and ambassador programs. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Julian Alssid: Across all of the conversations we have on this podcast, and in our consulting work too, there is one challenge that keeps coming up in different forms. Historically, we have built a higher education system in which career readiness is treated as something that comes at the end: a capstone course, a final-semester internship, a credential layered on top of everything else. And in doing this, we have essentially been signaling to students: learn first, and then maybe we will talk about what any of this means for your career. Kaitlin LeMoine: That is so true. And what makes it particularly striking is that the courses where career readiness is most absent are often the very first ones students encounter on their learning journeys. General education and introductory courses are taken by virtually every college student, many in their first year. And while they are an almost universal touchpoint in higher education, they are often not designed with career readiness in mind. Julian Alssid: Which raises the question our guests today have spent real time trying to answer: what would it actually look like to change that? Not adding on career readiness, but genuinely embedding it, making the case that career readiness can and should happen in gateway courses, right from the very start of a student's college experience. Kaitlin LeMoine: And that is exactly what Laura DaVinci and Robert McGuire set out to research and discuss in their new report, The Career Readiness Imperative in Gateway Courses, published through Every Learner Everywhere. To provide a bit of background on our two guests: Laura has been with Every Learner Everywhere since its founding in 2018, and currently serves as its Director. She has dedicated her career to improving educational outcomes through innovative, technology-enhanced approaches, and has led complex, grant-funded programs across a wide range of partners and funders, including the Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation, to name just a few. Julian Alssid: And Robert McGuire brings over 30 years of reporting on education, and has worked as an adjunct professor of composition and literary studies. His magazine and newspaper reporting has won multiple national and regional press awards. Through McGuire Editorial and Consulting, which he founded in 2013, Robert works with national nonprofits, colleges and universities, and education technology organizations to produce thought leadership that, as he puts it, is the ungoogleable: content that is genuinely derived from the work people are doing and moves conversations in new directions. Laura and Robert, welcome to Work Forces. We are delighted to have you both with us today. Laura DaVinci: Thank you very much. Robert McGuire: We're delighted to be here. Thank you. Kaitlin LeMoine: So, Laura, to get us started, please tell us a bit more about your background and Every Learner Everywhere — its origins, its structure, and what drives the work? Laura DaVinci: I'm the director of Every Learner Everywhere, and as you said in the bio, I come with a background of program development, grant management, and I've always been at the heart of nonprofit and higher education. I'm really committed to seeing students succeed, and with Every Learner, I could do that at the gateway course level. As Every Learner Everywhere, we're a network of partner organizations, and our mission is to partner with colleges and universities to harness digital learning technology in ways that drive innovation and improve outcomes for every learner. What makes us a little unusual is the network structure. WCET and WICHE, which stands for Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, serve as our parent organizations, and around that, we've built a network of partners that includes groups like Achieving the Dream, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, the Online Learning Consortium, and many more. Each brings deep expertise in a different piece of the puzzle, whether that's pedagogy, technology, research, or professional development. And we bring that collective capacity directly to institutions. Our origins are rooted in a very specific student outcomes problem: many students start college, but they don't finish, and a lot of that attrition happens in the gateway and general education courses. That's where we've always been focused. We build capacity through three things: direct technical assistance, free resources, webinars and toolkits, and ongoing analysis of what's actually working in the field. This report is a great example of that third piece — taking a real question and putting evidence and practical guidance behind it. Julian Alssid: Great, thank you for that, Laura. And Robert, turning to you, can you tell us a bit more about your work as a content strategist in the higher ed and workforce development spaces? Robert McGuire: Thank you. Essentially, I'm a managing editor for thought leadership initiatives. I set up the storytelling machinery for organizations like Every Learner Everywhere who are trying to grow their audiences. My clients typically have a lot of raw data, research, insights, and stories, but all of that is locked up in the heads of their internal experts, employees, stakeholders, or partners. I help get that data and those stories out into the world where they can start to influence conversations in their field. I do that by setting up the editorial workflow, and I have a team of writers who help deliver all that content — or in cases where I get particularly energized, I take the lead on writing it myself, which is what happened with this report. The way my business relates to the topic at hand: about 13 years ago, when MOOCs were dominating the conversation about online learning, I got very interested in online learning and started to develop an expertise in education technology. My client base at that time started to include a lot of edtech startups. As your listeners probably know, education technology startups sell not just into K-12 and higher education, but also into major employers for their workforce development and talent learning initiatives. Working with those clients, I gained a better understanding of the continuum of learning from higher ed through workplace learning. Alongside those edtech startups, my client mix has grown to include nonprofits like CompTIA, EDUCAUSE, and Every Learner Everywhere — large membership-oriented or network nonprofits that are trying to be leading voices in their fields. I help them articulate that voice by setting up the strategy and running the editorial workflow. Julian Alssid: Robert, you recently published the report, The Career Readiness Imperative in Gateway Courses, which makes the case that career readiness can and should happen in introductory and general education courses, not just capstones. We would love to learn more about what led you to this area of inquiry and research. Robert McGuire: Well, what led me to it is that Every Learner said they were interested in doing more on the subject and asked if I had any ideas. I scoped it out, but I'll let Laura speak to why Every Learner particularly had an interest in doing more around career readiness. Laura DaVinci: We've worked with so many institutions of higher education, especially in the gateway courses, and the connection to career readiness has come up repeatedly. It comes straight out of the mission and values of Every Learner to center the student voice in our work. Across survey after survey, students say loud and clear that launching a professional career is their top priority — that's why they're coming to college. About 60% of enrolled students say expected job opportunities are a very important factor in their decision to enroll. We also know from learning science that making learning relevant is on

    Laura DaVinci and Robert McGuire: The Career Readiness Imperative in Gateway Courses

  7. May 26

    Miriam Altman-Reyes: Investing in AI-Driven Solutions for Economic Mobility

    Miriam Altman-Reyes, founding managing partner of Brass Ring Ventures, discusses her path from public school teacher to entrepreneur to venture capitalist, and how each chapter informs her current work leading a seed fund and growth studio focused on the future of work and learning. Drawing on her experience co-founding and selling Kinvolved to PowerSchool, Miriam explains how her team of exited operators supports early-stage founders across four investment themes: early success systems, operational efficiency, social capital development, and workforce upskilling and reskilling. The conversation explores how private capital can play a distinctive role in scaling AI-driven solutions for learners and workers, and why the defensibility of technology matters more than ever as larger players enter the education and workforce space. Miriam shares examples from her current portfolio and offers practical guidance for leaders navigating labor market shifts, emphasizing adaptability, mission alignment, and the enduring importance of human skills that AI cannot replace. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Kaitlin LeMoine: In our recent Work Forces episodes, we've looked at the future of work through different lenses, from the technical infrastructure of credentials to the institutional shifts happening at community colleges and national nonprofits. And today, we're continuing our focus on the innovators who are driving these changes by looking specifically at the role of investment in the work and learning ecosystem. Julian Alssid: While we often talk about policy and systemic shifts, it's equally important to understand how private capital and exited operators—or founders who have successfully built and sold their own companies—are identifying and scaling the next generation of solutions, particularly as artificial intelligence begins to fundamentally reshape how we prepare the workforce. Kaitlin LeMoine: And our guest today brings a unique perspective as both a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Miriam Altman-Reyes is the founding managing partner of Brass Ring Ventures, an exited operator-led seed fund and growth studio. Miriam and her team focus on investing in AI-driven solutions that prepare learners and workers for a rapidly evolving labor market. Julian Alssid: Miriam is an expert in the industry who's experienced the full life cycle of a social impact startup. She was the co-founder and CEO of Kinvolved, which she led from its inception to a successful acquisition by PowerSchool in 2022. Her leadership has been recognized by many, including Forbes 30 Under 30 and the New York Times, and she maintains a deep commitment to driving economic mobility for underrepresented populations. Kaitlin LeMoine: Miriam, your path from being a public school teacher in New York City to leading a venture fund gives you an incredible perspective on how to best support innovators and solve for the challenges ahead across learning, work, and economic mobility. We are very excited to have you with us. Welcome to this podcast. Miriam Altman-Reyes: Thank you. I'm really thrilled to be here. Appreciate you having me. Julian Alssid: Yes, Miriam, welcome. And so we've talked a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear in your own words about your journey—the path that led you to found and lead Brass Ring Ventures. Miriam Altman-Reyes: So, I moved to New York right out of college, almost 20 years ago—amazing to say, hard to believe—to initially start a career in education. I moved to the city to teach in a public high school through a program called Teach For America, where I witnessed firsthand many different challenges facing our education system. But the one that really stuck with me because it was just so foundational was student absenteeism. You know, kids who would miss school for a variety of reasons, but at the end of the day, you know, as, uh, as I think we all know, if, you know, you don't show up, it's very hard to be successful, um, in whatever it is you're trying to achieve. And I think of my time in the classroom as really kind of trying to understand some of the underlying challenges behind student absenteeism and the opportunities to solve for it. And I found, from an operational perspective, that there were really two parts of the challenge that I felt that eventually technology could help solve. One was that educators, administrators, parents, and students themselves didn't have access to data to really help understand what's going on and therefore inform interventions to solve the problems. And then, two, that those stakeholder groups were really not able to be in close and regular communication to help, ideally, even prevent absenteeism from happening in the first place, um, because of just a really broken communication sort of system between school and home. So I left the classroom having sort of thought of the challenge—I certainly witnessed the challenge, um, thought of some of the solution possibilities. I actually left the classroom thinking I was going to start a school as I entered into my graduate degree at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. And in the first two weeks of the program ended up pivoting to starting an education technology company. And eventually that, uh, company offered a platform of multiple tools that did just what I just described, you know, providing more real-time access to data and facilitating two-way communication between school and home, really heavily focused on underserved populations where student absenteeism tends to be most profound. And so I led as one of the co-founders and the CEO of the business over the course of about eight years from, of course, idea through eventually our exit, as you mentioned, uh, in your earlier comments. Many different chapters along the way, but, um, you know, and lots of highs and lows, as with any entrepreneurial business. But maybe some of the highlights are that we, first of all, from an efficacy perspective, achieved positive results from three third-party efficacy studies that really showed that our solution did, in fact, work at reducing absenteeism, which therefore had impacts on short- and long-term academic gains, including graduation. Also, we became a profitable business, even though we did raise financing over the years from a number of different sources—from venture capital to debt financing to strategic sources, um, you know, grants and others. We did become profitable, um, before we were acquired. And we were a business that sold our software to arguably one of the hardest, uh, you know, buyers that exists, that's K-12 schools and districts across the US. And at the time of our acquisition, we had customers from small rural districts to New York City public schools across about half of US states. So it was a really great run, um, and super proud of the work that we did. I then stayed on at PowerSchool, who had acquired us, which then had recently gone public. We were their second acquisition as a publicly traded company, as primarily in the role of Vice President of Go-to-Market Strategy and Partnerships for their New Solutions Group, which essentially was spun up around the time of our own company's acquisition, with the goal being to help develop more, um, sort of organic growth to help offset a lot of the acquisition-related growth that PowerSchool, um, had become famous for over, you know, many years. Uh, and so I reported to the Chief Product Officer and worked on launching four products across the entire ecosystem of PowerSchool's, I think, maybe 25 to 30 products in total. So really got that much broader perspective after having been so specifically focused on building my own business and my own problem set for many years. And that was certainly, by, um, opportunity and also by design. But ultimately, I decided that I really wanted to be closer to the early stage, closer to the ground, and closer to the impact. And also had, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit in some ways never dies, and so I knew I wanted to start something, uh, new again. And so I left PowerSchool just about three years ago to start Brass Ring Ventures with the initial idea being that as a founder, you know, I had incredible mentors, advisors, and board members who were exited founders and operators in their own right, and they knew exactly the right time to provide support, how to provide support, how to push, um, and also how to let me sort of like lead and learn, um, as a first-time, uh, CEO. And I realized in talking with dozens of other founders that were earlier in their journey that that experience that I'd had was particularly unique. And I also was really fortunate that I had a team of exited operators and founders in my last business's executive team that wanted to work together again. And so we came back together as partners in Brass Ring Ventures, both the studio and now in the fund. Um, I'm sure we'll go into more, but that is a little bit of how I got to where I am today. Kaitlin LeMoine: What a cool and amazing story, and certainl

    Miriam Altman-Reyes: Investing in AI-Driven Solutions for Economic Mobility

  8. May 12

    Philip Weinberg: Scaling High-Impact Workforce Solutions

    Philip Weinberg, President and CEO of STRIVE, discusses the organization's intensive, evidence-based model for workforce development. Drawing on his background in government and the private sector, Weinberg explains how STRIVE blends rigorous professional training with long-term "lifetime" coaching to help individuals facing significant systemic barriers move into family-sustaining career paths. The conversation explores STRIVE's rapid national expansion to 14 cities and its strategic approach to scaling without compromising quality, including the use of anchor employer partnerships to backward map training for high-demand sectors like healthcare, construction, and logistics. Weinberg emphasizes the necessity of ongoing coaching and social supports as the "secret sauce" for helping students thrive and discusses practical steps for building more inclusive talent pipelines. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our workforce's consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our workforces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in. Julian Alssid: Kaitlin, in so many of our recent conversations, we've discussed how workforce development has moved from being a fringe topic to a central economic imperative. Over the past few years, there's been a real shift toward a skills-based ecosystem where the goal isn't just a one-and-done credential, but creating sustainable, family-sustaining career paths. Kaitlin LeMoine: It's true, Julian. And while the policy and tech landscapes are moving incredibly fast, we keep coming back to the importance of the human connection and social supports as the true secret sauce for helping students persist and thrive in this new economy. It's not just about the technical training; it's also about the foundational skills that allow learners to pivot and grow over a long-term career. Julian Alssid: Which is why we're so thrilled to have our guest join us today. Phil Weinberg is a leader who's been at the forefront of this work for years, proving that high-quality, intensive training can fundamentally change the trajectory of lives and communities. Kaitlin LeMoine: That's right, and the breadth of his experience is what makes him such a powerful voice on this topic. Phil is the President and CEO of STRIVE, and his career has spanned the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Before taking the helm at STRIVE in 2011, Phil was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as President of the New York City Workforce Investment Board, where he oversaw workforce development services for the nation's largest workforce area. Julian Alssid: Phil's journey also includes significant leadership in education reform and private sector experience at the management consulting firm Bain & Company. That range of experience is exactly what he's used to lead STRIVE through a period of growth and renewal. Under Phil's leadership, STRIVE has scaled to 14 cities, focusing on helping students facing significant systemic barriers across the workforce. Kaitlin LeMoine: STRIVE has become a model for how to blend rigorous professional training with the long-term coaching necessary to move people from entry-level jobs into sustained careers. We are so happy to have you with us today. Welcome to the Work Forces podcast, Phil. Phil Weinberg: Thank you. Really thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. Kaitlin LeMoine: So, as we dive into the conversation today, Phil, we'd love to hear you tell us in your own words a bit more about your background and the journey really that led you to your role at STRIVE. Phil Weinberg: Like many people, my journey has not been a straight line. As you've described it, it's been across multiple sectors: corporate, government, and now nonprofit. And I think like a lot of people, I entered the corporate sector thinking that was where the innovation was happening and if you wanted to do big things in social impact, that would be the platform to do so. And I had an early experience, my first time working in government in Chicago—and this was, to date myself, back in the 1990s during the sort of welfare-to-work reform era—and I had the incredible fortune to work with some audacious, courageous, visionary leaders within government working across sectors. For me, it really opened my eyes to what's possible and the ability to do big things from government and across sectors. So, I once again found myself within city government, as you noted, working in the Bloomberg administration here in New York City, focused on helping uplift individuals and access career opportunities that could, in fact, change their lives and their families' lives. Whether it was on the education reform side, as you noted earlier, or on the career pathways economic mobility side, my career has always been focused on the question of how do we help individuals gain opportunity, advance in their lives, and how do we create communities that are more just and more equitable? And so, I'm sitting in city government, I got a call from a recruiter, and it turned out that STRIVE—which at that point had been around for about 25 years—had been a leading workforce development nonprofit. Its CEO was transitioning, and they were looking for someone to lead STRIVE into the future. And so, I came up to visit the team, I stepped into a classroom, and I was totally blown away by the power and depth and quality and engagement of what I encountered. And so for me, I just imagined how powerful it could be to take that model, expand it in New York City, and ultimately to consider how we could scale that in partnership with additional communities around the country. So, that's what landed me here at STRIVE. I am almost 15 years in and really grateful and energized to be part of this organization and part of this work, as you noted, in advancing economic mobility in communities nationally. Julian Alssid: So, STRIVE has grown and I guess serves about 2,000 students now, and you have a goal of serving 10,000 with support from your investors, like Blue Meridian and others. We heard you talk about using an evidence-based approach. So, how are you going to use an evidence-based approach to ensure that your really exponential expansion there doesn't compromise the quality of outcomes? Phil Weinberg: Well, I appreciate the question. You've actually perfectly hit upon the real tension, I think, for any organization that's considering taking a quality model and bringing it to scale. And so, I'd say that tension between quality, scale—I'd add a third component, which is the economics of scale—how to ensure that as you do grow and expand, that happens in a way that's economically sustainable. And I'd say for us, the focus on quality as we scale is first and foremost rooted in our values. As an organization, what do you believe? What's your true north? How do you ensure that you hold dear to those principles and those values and that all decisions really flow through that filter? More practically speaking, for us, it starts with having built an evidence-based model in partnership with our research partners at MDRC. So, building a comprehensive model that's built on the best evidence—in our case, it's predicated on the work-advance model. And so, ensuring that we are confident in the evidence base upon which our work is structured. Once we built that foundation, it then is incumbent on us as we grow to think about what elements of that model are essential to remain consistent across our communities we serve, and where do we see a need to be contextualized? In many cases, we see tremendous value and opportunity to contextualize the work that we do within our community partners—so, partnering with community colleges and other anchor institutions as a way to ensure that as STRIVE expands, we're doing so in a way that is authentic and resonant within the communities we serve. Investing in infrastructure. So, clearly there is delivering great programming, but then there is as you scale, having the infrastructure to support scaling with quality. What does that look like? These are often the not-the-most-glamorous aspects of operating a nonprofit, but often some of the most essential. Having strong performance systems and financial systems and data systems; having the operational backbone; having the programmatic support tools to ensure that as you grow, the support system is in place to grow thoughtfully and with quality. And I guess the last thing I would say is really growing with an eye toward being a learning organization. That certainly is one of our values at STRIVE, which is we've got a deep history to draw upon. Over four decades of service, over 90,000 students served. While there is that very deep reservoir of history of practice, we also approach the work with a great deal of humility, which is: what are we learning? What is the labor market telling us? What are the kind of policy context changes telling us? And how do we as an organization adapt accordingly so we can maintain quality and focus even as we grow? So, not an easy feat, I won't claim that we have sort of honed this, but we are certainly with a values-driven approach committed to that endeavor. Kaitlin LeMoine: So Phil, you've give

    Philip Weinberg: Scaling High-Impact Workforce Solutions
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Seeking to optimize your organization for the future of work and learning? Join workforce and education strategists Julian Alssid and Kaitlin LeMoine as they speak with the innovators who are shaping the future of workforce and career preparation. Together, they will unpack the big problems these individuals are solving and discuss the strategies and tactics that really work. This bi-weekly show is for practitioners and policymakers looking for practical workforce and learning solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

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  • Creator
    Work Forces
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    78
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026
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    Work Forces