Work Forces

Work Forces
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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.

  1. 1d ago

    Jeremy Schifeling: Navigating AI in Hiring and Career Preparation

    Jeremy Schifeling, author and career coach, has devoted his career to helping others succeed in theirs, from teaching kindergarten in Brooklyn, NY to training career professionals at more than 350 organizations and universities worldwide. In this conversation, Jeremy traces the arc from AI's early promise as a career coaching tool to the arms race it has created in hiring, where students are applying to hundreds of jobs with AI-generated materials and recruiters are struggling to identify real talent. He shares data about the enduring power of human connection and referrals over algorithmic job searching, making the case that career centers are uniquely positioned to lead on AI fluency rather than wait for someone else to go first. He also challenges educators and workforce practitioners to stop using complexity as a permission slip for inaction.  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. The New York Times recently published a thought-provoking story about a new MIT report that is warning that AI is causing what they call cognitive surrender on college campuses, with students reaching for chatbots when struggling with a new concept, and university leaders offering a range of guidance about how to respond. Some are embracing AI enthusiastically, others are banning it, and many are somewhere in between, trying to figure out the right answer in real time. Julian Alssid: And that tension lands right at the heart of what we think about in workforce development, if students are outsourcing their thinking to AI before they ever even enter the labor market, you know what does that mean for the skills they bring with them, and who is responsible for helping them develop the judgment to know when to use AI and when not to? Those aren't just questions for universities; they're questions for employers, career coaches, and really anyone who works at this intersection of learning and careers. Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to our guest today, Jeremy Schifeling, has devoted his career to helping others succeed in theirs. From teaching kindergarten in Brooklyn to leading education marketing at LinkedIn. He's gone on to publish best-selling LinkedIn and AI job-seeking books on Amazon and train career professionals at more than 350 organizations and universities worldwide. Jeremy's newest book, Unbreakable, makes the case that the workers who will thrive in the age of AI are not the ones chasing every new tool, but the ones developing the scarce human skills that technology cannot replace. Jeremy, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us today. Jeremy Schifeling: Thanks for having me on. Thrilled to be here. Julian Alssid: Great, Jeremy. Yes, so glad to have you here. And if you will, in your own words, tell us a bit about your background. Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah, absolutely. So as mentioned, you know, I got my start teaching kindergarten in Bed Stuy, and one of the things that I realized early on was technology was going to be part of these kids' lives forever. And here I was in the early 2000s teaching them how to make PowerPoint, how to make mp3s. It seems quaint by today's standards, but then over the course of my journey working at LinkedIn, working as a career coach at the University of Michigan, working with all these schools today, I realize that technological drumbeat has only gotten faster and faster with each passing year. And so, one of the things I've always been very passionate about is how do we prepare that next generation, not just to survive these technological changes, but actually to thrive. And so, that's what we're all trying to figure out right now in this age of AI. Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely. So, I mean, you've you've written a few books, right? That in some ways trace that arc of how careers and job searching have changed. And of course, this is going from learners in kindergarten to you know people going into the workforce. But those books have covered mastering LinkedIn, using AI as a career coach to your newest book, would love to have you walk us through your evolution and your thinking, and and what what do you feel are some of the common threads that cut across and and new learnings that emerged for you as you wrote each of those books. Jeremy Schifeling: So I'll just sort of pick up with AI because I think that's what's on everyone's minds these day these days. So I had really sort of this interesting opportunity, which is I was leading the marketing team at Khan Academy back in 2022, and my boss Sal Khan came to me that summer and said, Jeremy, I just got this amazing new tool from my buddy Sam Altman over at OpenAI. This was before anyone knew who Sam Altman really was, and I said, Ah, we always hear about these new things in Silicon Valley, you know, crypto and all this stuff. And then I used ChatGPT when it was still in beta before it had been released to the public for the first time, and I was like, Wow, this is going to be big. I could even tell back then, but I was so naive because, as someone who had been a career coach, I thought it was going to be a panacea. I had worked with all these international students, all these introverts who had trouble telling their story, and that was holding them back when it came to the job search. I said, now everyone's going to have a career coach in their pocket. Everything's going to be solved. Fast forward two years, and I'm working with all these students around the country and around the world. None of them are using it the way that I envisioned, you know, to figure out their perfect path in life and to do all this deep reflection, instead they're using it like the Staples Easy button: build me a resume, write me a cover letter, and now I'm talking to all the recruiters of the world who are throwing up their hands, saying, Jeremy, this is a disaster. I can't tell who's good. Everything just seems fake. And so, really, this AI journey in just a couple of years went from what I thought was going to be utopia to a little bit of a nightmare, and now we're trying to find our way out of it. Julian Alssid: Well, so yeah, so kind of diving a little bit, a little bit deeper there. So you've described AI as creating an arms race in in hiring and career preparation, you know, for everyone involved with you know students racing ahead as we've discussed, and employers trying to get a handle on this, and you know, and some employers kind of you know a little frozen as to what to do around hiring, and so can you unpack that dynamic and what what does it mean for all the people and institutions who are trying to navigate their way? Jeremy Schifeling: So imagine you know fall 2022, ChatGPT comes out. All of a sudden, students who once might have applied to 10 or 20 jobs realize that the incremental cost of applying to a marginal job has essentially gone to zero. Right? Say ChatGPT, build me resumes for every one of these 100 job applications. Done. And so now all of a sudden, if you're a recruiter, you were facing about 100 applications per job in the fall of 2022. Here in the fall of 2026, you're facing about 250 applications per job, more than a doubling in just a few short years. At the same time, because there were these huge layoffs going through the industry, guess who was being laid off every time you saw a headline at Amazon or Meta or any of these places? It was the recruiters because if these firms were consolidating, they just needed fewer recruiters to do the job. So all of a sudden, you have more applications from students, fewer recruiters to process them. It's a disaster for the recruiting profession. So what do they do? They erect higher barriers. They either have entry-level jobs that require five years of experience, or they have even more high-powered applicant tracking systems that basically say, Hey, we've got to screen out 95% of these candidates because we don't have time to deal with them. Now, come back to the student. This is sort of the cycle part. They say, Hey, it just got way harder to get a job, there are fewer entry-level jobs all of a sudden, and my acceptance rate is way lower. I better apply to even more jobs using even more AI, and the cycle spins and spins in classic arms race fashion. Kaitlin LeMoine: And so, what I mean, as you're having these conversations with with job seekers, with students, with career coaches, I mean, what are some of the what's some of the guidance you're offering, right? Because this is, as you're saying, this is a really complex time and and sort of unprecedented in many ways. Would love to hear the guidance you're offering to these different, you know, key players in the space. Jeremy Schifeling: Yeah. So to build on a sort of arms race metaphor, how do you stop an arms race? You have to have a peace treaty, right? You have to step outside of that vicious cycle dynamic and find a better way. And so, what I'm recommending on both sides of the house is getting back to the more humanistic things. What I tell coaches and students is: Look, you might think that your chance of getting any job is something like 0.1 p

    Jeremy Schifeling: Navigating AI in Hiring and Career Preparation

  2. Sep 15

    Kate Kreamer: Building CTE Systems That Work for Every Student

    Kate Kreamer, Executive Director of Advance CTE, the longest-standing national nonprofit representing state leaders responsible for secondary, postsecondary, and adult career and technical education, discusses what it actually takes to build CTE systems that are rigorous, relevant, and ready to scale. Kate makes the case for two-way academic integration, arguing that while CTE programs have long been expected to reinforce core academics, there has never been a reciprocal expectation that core academic teachers draw on labor market data and career competencies to make their instruction more relevant. The conversation explores the perennial challenge of employer engagement, why the field keeps having the same conversation about advisory committees without cracking the code on co-design and co-investment, and what models like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Talent Pipeline Management program are doing differently. Kate also examines the growing role of intermediaries in building and sustaining strong career pathways, why sustainability remains the field's biggest unanswered funding question, and why the single most important thing educators, employers, and policymakers can do is go see a modern CTE program in action before drawing any conclusions about what it is or isn't. 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: As we continue season seven, career and technical education keeps coming up as a thread across our work and our conversations on this podcast. There's real momentum in the field right now, and with that momentum comes some genuinely hard questions about quality, consistency, and how to build systems that work for every student. Kaitlin LeMoine: And those questions, along with the answers to them, look very different depending on where you sit. What they look like at the state policy level, where the decisions about standards, funding, and employer engagement, among other key factors, actually get made, is something we've been wanting to dig into more deeply on this show for some time. Julian Alssid: Which is exactly why we're so glad to have today's guest with us. Kate Kreamer is the Executive Director of Advance CTE, the longest-standing national nonprofit representing state leaders responsible for secondary, post-secondary, and adult career and technical education across the country. Kate first joined Advance CTE in 2013 and was appointed executive director by the board in 2023, bringing with her a background that includes work at Achieve, Third Way, and the Progressive Policy Institute. Kate, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us. Kate Kreamer: Thank you, Julian and Kaitlin. Glad to be here. Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for being with us. And as we dive in, we would love to give you the floor to tell us a bit more about your background and the path that led to your current role as Executive Director of Advance CTE. Kate Kreamer: Great. Well, thank you. Well, I like many people that work in the education sector, my parents were in education. My father was a chemistry teacher turned building and then district level administrator. My mother was a librarian turned library director. So it's in my DNA, and the value is just inherent in everything I did growing up, and just kind of a core expectation that education is the grounding of what really brings your future. But I also was very aware, and increasingly became aware, kind of in high school, of the opportunities created by my parents, including moving out of New Haven, where my father went to high school and taught, actually, but chose to move to a suburb when they had my brother and myself, in large part because of the schools, and that always, you know, and the challenges he had in New Haven that were very different than the challenges we had in my suburban school, kind of recognized this is actually not something that everyone has access to in the right way, and was something that kind of woke something up and raised some questions for me. And I kind of found public policy, which is a random thing to find, but I found it really in my undergraduate. I was studying urban regional studies, and that had a lot of economic development, public policy, and environmental science behind it, and that's when I kind of married the two. This idea of public policy, education, economic development—didn't know that was going to be a part of my career, but it does make sense. I mean, that was what I was really interested in. So I moved right to DC. I fell in love with DC as a kid, knew I wanted to do public policy in college, started directly in grad school and an internship, and this was right in the middle to late aughts when college readiness was really taking off as a conversation, and it really struck me. I'm a very practical, pragmatic person. This idea of high school reform at this point, but this idea that high school is this pivot point between K-12 and whatever comes next, that just resonated. Why would high school be the end when it really is the connector across these systems? So I ended up working at Achieve, as you mentioned. Spent seven years there, and that was an organization that really led college readiness efforts. They were behind the Common Core, the PARCC assessments, Next Generation Science Standards. But I really loved that content, and also worked with state leaders across all those sectors: K-12, postsecondary, workforce, governors' offices, private industry. And in that, I really saw the power of state leadership and a shared agenda. But as I was going along, it was my dream job when I ended up there as an early 20-something-year-old, but we were talking academic preparation for college and careers. We really weren't trying to tackle the technical or even those transferable skills. And it probably was Perkins IV, which was reauthorized in 2006, where, as happens when you have major federal legislation, it starts a national conversation. So people started talking about CTE and Perkins. And I kind of started digging in, and that's when I met my predecessor at Advance CTE and started working with the Association for Career and Technical Education and others, and just fell in love with it and became the champion and voice within that organization. Was able to do some really cool work around applied math and how you're applying math across different CTE areas. Did these Math at Work brochures where 50,000 of them were sent out, actually demonstrating that you do need math in careers, but also got to write papers and do a whole bunch of work. I was really appreciative that where there was opportunity and space, the organization let me pursue my passion. But when I had the chance in 2013 to move and do CTE full time, I jumped right at it. I've spent 13 years at Advance CTE. The organization has changed dramatically, the field has changed dramatically, the environment has changed dramatically, and it's been really exciting. Obviously I'm still here after all these years, so I still have that passion for the work and the opportunities, most importantly, that it provides learners across the country. Julian Alssid: Well, it's so great, Kaitlin, when we get past the canned bio to the actual story. It's really great to hear your story. It's an excellent segue, especially given your background. Advance CTE has made a strong push on academic integration in CTE, making the case that connected learning and academic preparation belong together rather than in separate tracks, which is how they've been treated in many places historically. Apart from you, or including you, what's driving that conversation now, and where do you see the field heading? Kate Kreamer: Yeah, I think there are a couple things to that. This has been something that I've been really passionate about. A lot of the work I did in my last organization was around bringing CTE and core academics together as the way in, but there hasn't been a lot of momentum. In recent years, a lot of that was very standards-based, and people got a little burned out on standards after Common Core and didn't really want to lean in here. But where we are right now, the real difference is there is now a shared understanding that all learners should have opportunities for career-connected learning or some sort of career readiness engagement experiences. That was not really the case 10 years ago, where we were saying every student should have career advising, work-based learning, and be ready for a full range of postsecondary options. That national conversation and momentum has really shifted, in part because CTE has momentum, is getting more visibility, has amazing outcomes, and more learners want that engagement and relevance—which is not a new thing, but in this moment with COVID, the cost of higher ed, and the changing workforce, it's more prescient than ever before. We also have a growing body of research that supports what those of us in the field have known: learners want relevance. You're seeing a lot of data from Gen Z and younger learners asking for that in much more explicit ways. In

    Kate Kreamer: Building CTE Systems That Work for Every Student

  3. Sep 1

    Adam Goldfarb: Harnessing AI for Economic Opportunity

    Adam Goldfarb, Founding Executive Director of Opportunity AI, a collaborative of more than 100 foundations focused on AI's impact on jobs and economic mobility, discusses how philanthropy and the social sector can work together to ensure AI expands rather than narrows economic opportunity. Drawing on his experience leading Schmidt Futures' workforce technology initiative and co-founding Opportunity AI, Adam maps the emerging landscape of economic opportunity funders into four distinct camps: those focused on worker voice and governance, those preparing transition systems for potential disruption, those building AI-powered tools for the social sector, and those watching the growing entry of wealth from the AI industry itself. The conversation explores the most promising categories of AI use cases in workforce development, from career navigation tools and AI-powered coaching to benefits access and operational efficiency for nonprofits, and why philanthropy needs real-time labor market observability to detect how AI is reshaping jobs and skills before it's too late to respond. Adam also makes the case that agility, for workers, training organizations, and funders alike, may be the defining touchstone of this era, and offers a vision for how the sector can move faster and more experimentally without losing sight of the learners it exists to serve. 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: As we continue Season 7, there is one topic that has come to dominate virtually every conversation we have in our consulting work, on this podcast, and frankly, everywhere we turn: artificial intelligence. The central question for our field isn't whether AI will change the nature of work and learning; it will. The question is how can we harness these tools in ways that genuinely expand economic opportunity for the people who need it most. Kaitlin LeMoine: And that question puts a real responsibility on the organizations and individuals who are in a position to shape how this moment unfolds. Funders, policymakers, and practitioners all have a role to play, and getting it right requires deliberate strategy and coordination, a willingness to move faster than maybe ever before, and a clear-eyed view of both the challenges and opportunities that come with AI tools as they emerge. Julian Alssid: Which brings us to our guest today. Adam Goldfarb is the founding executive director of Opportunity AI, a collaborative of more than 100 foundations focused on AI's impact on jobs and economic mobility. Before starting Opportunity AI, Adam launched and led Eric and Wendy Schmidt's grant-making program devoted to innovation and career training. Earlier in his career, Adam served as chief of staff of a state education agency, co-founded a charter high school, coordinated policy advocacy for the city of Newark, New Jersey, and led strategy for national nonprofits. Adam, welcome to Work Forces. We are so glad to have you with us. Adam Goldfarb: Thank you. It's amazing to be here. You know, all the longtime listener, first time caller, notes apply here. Thanks. So thank you. Kaitlin LeMoine: We're so glad you can join us today, Adam. We really appreciate it and look forward to diving in with you. As we get started, please tell us a bit more about your background and your current role at Opportunity AI. Adam Goldfarb: So, Julian, as you mentioned, I spent most of my early career working for mayors and governors. I did economic development policy for the city of Newark, New Jersey. I was chief of staff of the Connecticut Education Department, and the origin story here is: while I was in Newark, as you mentioned, I co-founded a high school, served as the board chair, and this was a school you're familiar with. You know, we did everything in our power to prepare a group of low income high school students to get into and to succeed in college. And long story short, we had great college acceptance rates, rates that beat the odds, and which were a wonderful achievement for the students, but relatively poor college completion rates. And I had personally, I think, underestimated the barriers that the traditional postsecondary system throws in front of low-income first-gen students. And so I think, like a lot of us, that inspired me to begin working on shorter-term interventions that can help low-income students get their first upwardly mobile job, achieve economic freedom. And so I took on roles in that space, and that's what led me eventually to Schmidt Futures, which was Eric and Wendy Schmidt's philanthropy. That's when I met you, Julian. I was helping them rethink their shared prosperity work. We had a program using technology to help workforce training entities improve their growth and scalability with your help. So yeah, I got to work with a lot of the most amazing organizations in our space. Organizations that I think your listeners are really familiar with: Social Finance, Empower, Propel America, Craft Education System, Upwardly Global. But what happened was, this takes us into 2023, and AI starts to grab the headlines, right, with ChatGPT coming out. And for me, and for I think a bunch of my colleagues who found themselves in grant maker roles, this was like an "oh crap" moment. I could imagine my boss calling me and saying, "What's your AI strategy? How does this change what we're doing with your program?" And I wasn't really sure. I don't come from a technical background. I wasn't really sure what I would say, and it was leading to a lot of crises of confidence of like, how can we deign to support this if we don't know the answer to that question? And so what happened was, I and the head of grant making at GitLab Foundation, whose name is Matt Ziegler—I think you had Ellie Bertani on a previous episode, right—so Matt and I started trading notes on what the two of us were reading about AI, and we pulled in some of our friends and we said, "Let's go on a regular Zoom." And those Zooms just sort of eventually became the community that became what we call now Opportunity AI, which we spun out with the help of a bunch of foundations in the space, like Gates and Comcast and Segal and Workday Foundation and Annie E. Casey, some others. And so today, those first Zooms have spawned a funder collaborative. We have over 200 members, as you mentioned, drawn from over 100 foundations. And Opportunity AI is trying to solve a problem that is endemic in philanthropy and long term in philanthropy, but that is becoming more acute. We think that the social sector, nonprofits, impact organizations that may be organized as for-profits, have a huge role to play in helping workers and learners adapt and succeed in the AI era. And for that to happen, funders have to step up to the plate. But unfortunately, economic opportunity funders are, on average, like me, not technical. We're not like former software engineers. We know a thing or two, hopefully, about economic opportunity and modalities there. So, how are we going to keep up with AI's developments given those non-technical backgrounds? And then two, philanthropy is just famously fragmented and super slow. You have too many duplicate efforts. We make would-be grantee partners deal with too much rigmarole. We descend into strategy refresh processes that take months and years, and so Opportunity AI is trying to be the collaboration infrastructure to solve those problems. We're helping funders learn and take action together in the economic opportunity world. We do that by learning, right? So our funders come together, they meet with the most cutting-edge practitioners, they hear from the frontier labs themselves, they learn about what's going well and what's not going well in use cases around AI in economic opportunity, and we bring funds together to align their funding and to craft new multi-donor projects together. Julian Alssid: You may not be techie, but you certainly have immersed yourself a bit now Adam Goldfarb: Yes Julian Alssid: in this brave new world. So we'd like to start broad and dig deeper, beginning with hearing from you about just your observations of how the AI funder and practitioner landscape has evolved over the past few years, and what shifts you are seeing. Adam Goldfarb: I think there are a few phenomena. I'm curious what you guys think. So one is just the simplest one: growth, growth of interest. Our community has grown. I think that you may not have thought of yourself as a practitioner or a funder as an AI funder or an AI practitioner, but suddenly you are finding yourself trying to place workers into an AI-inflected job market, and so you have found yourself—you may not have known this at first—but you are that. And so just growth of interest in the space relative to those origins I mentioned in '23. And the second thing, and I think this is a big difference from 2023 and 2024, it can seem from the outside, I feel like you go to a funder's website, a practitioner's website, and it just sounds like everyone's using the same words in a slightly different order about something happening with AI and some

    Adam Goldfarb: Harnessing AI for Economic Opportunity

  4. Aug 18

    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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
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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
    81
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026
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    Work Forces