Episode 42: The Future of Workplace Development with Steve Lee of SkillUp
The Covid-19 pandemic has taken an economic toll on America’s workers. With unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression, workers across the country are trying to reorient themselves in the face of an uncertain future. Part of this reorientation revolves around the fact that technology evolves at such a rapid pace that a gap is being created between industries and the skills their employees need to be effective in the workplace. An immediate solution to this common issue has been upskilling.
Upskilling can be defined as the process of acquiring new and relevant competencies that are required today and in the near future.
No Time to Wait
To address this critical need, SkillUp was launched in July 2020 as a reaction to the pandemic and the unemployment crisis. SkillUp is an upskilling, non-profit coalition built to help America’s laid-off and furloughed workers gain access to the training and employment opportunities they need to secure a place in the economy of the future. Rather than push workers back into jobs just like the ones they left, SkillUp gives workers the opportunity to build new skills that are suited to in-demand jobs with promising career paths.
Prior to joining the coalition as Executive Director, Steve Lee had more than 20 years of experience in non-profits, management consulting, and technology. Most recently, he served as Managing Director at Robin Hood, New York's largest poverty-fighting organization, leading efforts for the organization on micro-lending, legal counsel, and workforce development among other areas.
Just in the United States alone, 40% of low-wage workers lost their jobs due to the pandemic—roughly 35 million Americans. This has tangential effects, particularly on children. The trajectory of their life changes when their parents lose their means of earning an income.
SkillUp aims to quickly curate what an individual's job profile should look like, providing them with accurate job recommendations that are referenced against a labor market analysis to determine what are in-demand jobs across America with a liberal living wage. They take it a step further by connecting them with a training or certification provider that will properly train the worker to obtain the skills necessary to get those jobs.
The need was so dire for SkillUp’s services that they launched within a few weeks rather than months, or even years, like you might typically see in the tech industry. Naturally, things weren't perfect, but as the saying goes, "perfection is the enemy of good."
The Two Sides of Economic Recovery
Think about the K-shaped recovery. Essentially, after a recession, separate parts of the economy get steeper at both ends of the spectrum:
Those on the higher upward slope are doing significantly better than they were before Covid, and they were most likely already doing well.
Those on the downward slope are doing significantly worse than they were before Covid, and they were most likely already struggling.
There isn’t a definitive answer for how to solve that, but that's why SkillUp exists. SkillUp exists as a coalition working to change the curve of the K and move some people from the bottom closer to the top. Even before the pandemic, there were pre-existing segmented economies, which often occur among geographic, generational, or social class lines, or a combination of any of those. In the end, the existing economic division becomes much wider. The Covid-19 recession has been so unequal that it's not only considered to be one of the most unequal recessions in modern US history, it's also what prompted the concept of a K-shaped recovery to begin with.
Other recovery classifications can be seen as follow:
L-shaped recovery - a rapid recession that takes a long period of time for recovery.
U-shaped recovery - a rapid decline followed by a gradual then rapid recovery.
V-shaped recovery - a rapid decline with a rapid recovery.
W-shaped recovery - also referred to as a "double-dip" recession.
Gig Work: A Double-edged Sword
As traditional means of earning a living have eroded away, workers have had to stretch how they work as a result, which brings in the non-traditional gig workload. The caveat of taking on that much work is the time and energy that you're forced to commit in place of taking any upscaling classes. Unfortunately, employers are more than happy to pay gig workers at a certain rate instead of paying a singular worker a full-time wage.
We currently live in a skills-based economy. Many traditional universities haven't been able to provide the skills that the ever-evolving workforce requires in the same way that community colleges, boot camps, and nonprofits have. These discrepancies, scattered across the structure of our society, were palpable enough for Steve to commit himself to social causes like intergenerational poverty eradication and upskilling.
One way of combating those discrepancies is a renewed focus on education, primarily fixing K through 12, then reviewing higher education. The secondary way is shifting our approach to work. If non-traditional adults can get better work, the trickle-down effects can be observed by data. The positive effects of work are that kids are more likely to be more engaged in school, performing better academically as a result. Once they become adults, they'll be better off, their grandkids will be better off, and so on. This scope is important because it highlights generational poverty as being a fault line over time. And unless something is done about it, the K-shaped growth is going to become a straight line where the wealthy maintain a baseline of wealth and low-income individuals are excluded altogether.
Connect with Steve Lee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-msk-lee/
SkillUp is dedicated to helping more than 40 million workers get rehired for in-demand jobs in high-growth industries. Explore their full site or take their 30-second questionnaire to build a personalized career path and find training opportunities and open jobs near you.
__
This episode is brought to you by N2N’s Illuminate App, The iPaaS for Higher Education.
About N2N Services
Founded in 2010, N2N is committed to serving educational institutions and helping them figure out how to serve their students, faculty, and staff using the most innovative technologies and solutions available in the marketplace. Over the last decade, N2N has served over 300 academic institutions and enabled their student success journeys.
N2N Services Inc. is a leader in enterprise application integration and strategic advisory services for higher education, At N2N, we are committed to providing the highest quality solutions and collaboratively building student-centric solutions.
Learn more at https://illuminateapp.com/web/higher-education/
Subscribe and listen to more episodes at IlluminateHigherEducation.com
