Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Bridging the Skills-First Gap

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye, Program Director for Widening Pathways to Work at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation, addresses the critical gap between employers' intent to adopt skills-first hiring practices and actual implementation. Drawing from his background in higher education and workforce development, Agbeshie-Noye discusses the newly launched Center for a Skills First Future, designed specifically to support small and medium-sized businesses that employ half of all Americans but often lack the resources of large corporations to navigate hiring transformation. He explores the striking disconnect where 90% of employers acknowledge the benefits of skills-first hiring, yet only 15% have actively implemented it, and explains how the Center's many resources—including a Skills Action Planner, resource library, skills-first credential, and vendor database—helps employers determine an achievable place to start rather than boiling the ocean. The conversation addresses frustrations from both job seekers navigating an AI-enhanced application landscape, and employers struggling to distinguish genuine skills from enhanced resumes, while emphasizing that skills-first approaches complement rather than replace traditional degrees by treating skills as the primary currency for understanding what all credentials represent.

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: So our conversations on the podcast and in our consulting practice recently, increasingly revolve around the movement to a skills first approach to educating, hiring and developing talent.

Julian Alssid: Absolutely Kaitlin and and today we're turning our attention to the employer side of of that equation. And this is a critical conversation for all employers, but it's particularly critical for small and medium sized companies, where half of all Americans work. These smaller companies often lack the dedicated resources of large corporations to measure and track skills development, and it makes it challenging for them to adapt to new hiring models.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's right. And while skills are all the buzz, there can be a real gap between intent and action. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM Foundation, 90% of employers acknowledge the benefits of skills-first hiring, but only 15% have actively implemented it. That's a striking gap, and many HR leaders and executives recognize its strategic value, but struggle to implement significant changes.

Julian Alssid: Our guest today is uniquely positioned to address this challenge with a particular focus on helping small and medium sized employers unlock a wider range of qualified candidates by valuing a candidate's abilities and understanding how skills relate to traditional credentials.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Isaac Agbeshie-Noye is Program Director for Widening Pathways to Work at the SHRM Foundation. Over the last decade, he's served in a variety of leadership roles across nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions, and focused on aligning strategy, culture, and operations to create lasting transformation. He's also been an instructor for undergraduate and doctoral student seminars, exploring his passion for easing student transitions through their educational experiences. Isaac earned his bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Virginia, as well as masters and doctoral degrees in higher education administration from George Washington University. Isaac, welcome to this podcast. We're so excited to have you on Work Forces with us today.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Julian Alssid: Yes, and thank you for joining us, Isaac. We've talked a little bit about your background. Well, tell us a bit more and what led you to your role at the SHRM Foundation.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: I got here in part because I'm always very fascinated and very passionate about education and how people go about learning things that then activates them to do things. And so working in higher education, and encountering all of these college students that came in at 18, 19, 20, 21 years old with some understanding of the things that they thought that they were going to do for the rest of their lives, that was just really fascinating to me. And then seeing the evolution over time where their mind changed around that thing, that was also fascinating. I ended up getting into workforce development and talent cultivation, because I realized that it wasn't just enough to understand what they were learning when they were on the college campus, I was really intrigued by then what did they do? Like, where did they go? Where did they end up? How did they navigate their careers after they left that environment? And so that kind of helped me think more broadly, beyond getting people to degree attainment to getting them actually to career mobility and to ultimately, a productive citizenry, which is what, which is what the mission of higher education is actually designed to be. And so I got connected to the SHRM Foundation in part because I just have been really fascinated with, how do we get employers into the game even further to understand their role and to help them as they are trying to tap into this workforce that is filled with skills, but yet we're not matching people in ways that are quick, even though we can see some of the ways in which there might be alignment. And so this position is is actually structured to help try and address that, that gap.

Kaitlin LeMoine: As we jump into this conversation, we'd love to learn a little bit more about the SHRM Foundation and your role in widening pathways to work.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: The SHRM Foundation is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm of the Society for Human Resource Management. And the Society for Human Resource Management is the largest network of HR professionals in the world. And so we have 340,000 members that are then deployed and activated into all types of businesses around the world. And so we believe that we can leverage HR and leverage those professionals to advance social good, which is how the foundation came to be. And so in the foundation, we focus on three bodies of work: strengthening the HR field, because we don't often think about who's going to come behind the current HR folks, and who is actually going to take on the new challenges related to HR, and how are we positioning those folks to be successful in that, and so we have a body of work that's focused there. We have a body of work that's focused on thriving together, and how are we creating cultures of care within employers and employer environments. And so how are we focusing on things like the social determinants of health, about or caregiving or workplace mental health, the types of things that make people feel seen and safe at work in order to continue to be there. And then the third part is my area, which is the widening pathways to work area which is focused on skills first, and the things that we do to help employers adopt skills first approaches. How do we test things, try things out so that we are reducing the risk as best we can for people to adopt initiatives that are going to help talent be seen better. And then the other part of that is untapped pools of talent. So who are we not seeing and how can we create opportunities to see them better and also to get them fully activated in this world of work. And so the SHRM Foundation does all of that, and our goal is to try and figure out where are, what's the messaging, what are the levers, where, who are the partners that we need to bring together to actually make this ecosystem work for job seekers and employers at the same time.

Julian Alssid: Tell us a bit more about your area, Widening Pathways to Work. And in particular, we're really interested in hearing about the new Center for a Skills First Future.

Isaac Agbeshie-Noye: What's so exciting about that portfolio is that we're really trying to figure out what are the things that are getting in the way, and how can we start to solution around those things? And so we know that there are 7.3 million open jobs, and we are highly dissatisfied with that, because it's not because there's a shortage of talent. There's just a shortage of alignment. There isn't those connections and those systems that we're leveraging to make talent visible so that employers can make hiring decisions that make the most sense for them are, to some degree working, and in a lot of ways not working, and that is resulting in a lot of job seekers being incredibly frustrated, and employers also being dissatisfied with what they're getting. And in an age of AI, where we do have some functions that are being shifted based on technology, and we have job seekers leveraging AI to try and make themselves look more visible and competitive, we're in this environment where we have to be having this conversation about how we get these different sides to see each other. So th