 I'm actually going to start today with a story and then I'll get into a little bit of the context of the problem that we're trying to solve and how we're going about doing that. So the story I'm going to tell is about Joe and Joe is a Coloradan. He is an older gentleman that's been in the oil and gas industry for quite a few years and as many of you may know, that industry is changing pretty rapidly in the state of Colorado. Joe found himself without a job and he knew that he had really strong skills but he wasn't quite sure how to apply those skills to a new job and he did know that he wanted to go into sales but that was about all he knew and as he was out looking for jobs trolling the internet he actually found skillful so he found us and found the resources and information to be incredibly valuable to him he started leveraging it and then one of the things we also do is provide career coaching. He knew he needed just one more step to really help him get to that next step so he signed up for a career coach and that career coach was able to help him translate the skills that he already has into the skills that he needed for a new job in sales, put that into a resume as well as really hone his interviewing skills and polish them. Remarkably within just a couple of weeks Joe found a new job for a Windows manufacturing company and he's off on his new career and he really attributes the success that he's had to the tools that he found on skillful as well as the career coaching that he was able to get. So that's the story of Joe and the problem that Markle Foundation and skillful is trying to solve is the fact that the labor market is really failing to express supply and demand of skills in a way that job seekers can or really Americans in general can find meaningful career pathways and as well as acquiring the new skills that they would need in order to get to a more successful career. The result of that is that job seekers can't find meaningful work. Employers are unable to find the talent that they need and the educators are also having a challenge of really adapting to the demands of the marketplace and being able to better support both the employers and the job seekers. So how are we going about this? We are actually trying to couple both we've created and curated the best digital tools out there and married those two in person supports for both job seekers and employers in order to solve this skills challenge that we're having and really to create a common language in the marketplace around skills. The Markle Foundation started skillful which is a partnership with LinkedIn and Arizona State University at the national level and then with a whole bunch of Colorado partners at the state level starting with the governor and working with state county and city organizations as well as nonprofits and educators across the state and we have tools to support what we're looking at as the ecosystem of the skills-based labor market and that ecosystem we view as a triangle which has employers job seekers and educators at each one of the points of that triangle. The tools that we have for job seekers are there are many and they're out on skillful.com. The first one is a hot jobs tool so we're looking at all the data out there of occupations and employment in the state of Colorado looking at what types of jobs are popping and growing and putting them out there on the hot jobs tool. We're also leveraging LinkedIn for job search functionality so when you find a hot job you're interested in you can go out to LinkedIn and actually find jobs that are available in that area. LinkedIn has created a tool called Training Finder which is only available in Colorado and Phoenix and that tool outlines all of the training courses that are available for people that are interested in upskilling themselves and the critical component in order to be included on the Training Finder is employment outcomes and transparency so educators are unable to be a part of that tool if they're not providing the cost information as well as what the employment outcomes are for the programs that they're putting forth. And then finally we are linked out to edX which has a number of free online courses that individuals can find to help support them in their career search. So like I mentioned we're actually trying to couple this with in-person support so we have both events as well as coaches. The career coaches like I mentioned with Joe are out doing virtual or in-person coaching with people to help them create their resumes make them skills based resumes and really create an own an action plan so that individuals can own their own pathway to success. And then we're also doing a number of events where we are putting employers and job seekers in a room so that they can learn from one another. Job seekers can learn about the opportunities available employers have access to more and different types of candidates and it's a real live networking opportunity for job seekers because we know that networking is such a critical component of finding a new job. On the educator side we are trying to inform program development as well as employment outcomes so this is where the relationship with LinkedIn is really important because LinkedIn has so much data about alumni and about people that they can provide customized dashboards to educators to show where alumni are going over time how their alumni compare to other schools that are either have programs in their area or geographically in their area and they're really able to look at the skills that are acquired by people in those programs as well. And then finally on the employer side we are again trying to couple technology and data with in-person support. So we started our path for employers with a data-driven approach and looked at O-Net data as well as Burning Glass so O-Net is a federal database of jobs information. Burning Glass looks at all the job postings that are out on all the major job sites and we took that data to start with 20 occupations across two different industries IT and advanced manufacturing to really understand what the data was telling us for what skills and competencies are required to be successful in these 20 different occupations. We took that and then went to employers and held roundtables to say is this data right and does it actually jive with what you're seeing in your workplace and we updated that data set to be a real life deep dive guide for these occupations for employers to use to understand what's required for employees to be successful in these particular occupations. So again we started in IT and advanced manufacturing and have plans to go to additional industries, healthcare, and kind of cross-functional areas as well starting with business operations. Jobs with employers they can we have job posting templates so they can actually just take the templates and post it online using the skills based descriptions and we have also found that as we've worked with employers they have said time and time again we hire based on hard skills and we fire based on soft skills so we did a deep focus on not only the technical skills required for a particular occupation but also the foundational skills and the soft skills as well. The reasons that employers are very interested in this there are a few different reasons but the first one is that it actually opens up access to talent so if they're able to look at skills rather than degrees or other proxies it allows them to really open their talent pool and they have a lot more people to choose from in terms of filling jobs and it also helps them to fill jobs a lot faster. The second reason it's really important is that it requires an employer to actually think about what it takes to be successful in a particular occupation and if they start from that point it is very transparent to both them as well as the person that they are hiring to know what it takes to be successful in that particular occupation and they found that to be a very powerful tool for them. The third reason for employers is really because the skills gap is a national conversation and this is a way for them to start addressing it in their own communities with their own businesses and kind of lead the way in this critical conversation that we're having right now. So I'm actually going to close with the story about an employer and as we've been out working with employers across the state of Colorado there is an employer in northern Colorado that builds that manufactures a very precise lens and that it's a glass lens for rifles and historically they have only hired individuals that know how to manufacture this piece of glass and it's a very specific skill set and this was not due to skillful but on a whim they hired for this particular role a sushi chef and that sushi chef is one of their best people in that role and it's because the skill that is required for sushi is an incredibly detail oriented and precise skill. The same is required in creating these very specific and precise lenses and they are now true believers in the fact that it is the skill and the competency that is required not necessarily the experience or even the specific industry but that skill is what they need and they're changing the way they hire across the board due to that sushi chef. So that is skillful in a nutshell you can visit skillful.com and look at all of those resources both from a job seeker perspective as well as an employer perspective. Of course. It's super interesting to me to think about like using the LinkedIn data as a programmer right and all the ways you can approach that data and say like all right this company is doing hiring people for this job what previous jobs do we see them having what trends like might help them figure out what skills go into this job because I think part of the problem with credentials and degrees and so forth is we use them as a proxy for not knowing what the skills are right like what as you start to work with employers like what kind of pushback do you get from them or like are they just kind of like yeah we want to hire our own skills like really good ones. So I think the pushback we get from employers is not necessarily around skills specifically they intuitively they get it and they understand it the pushback is more I don't know how and I don't have time and so we are trying to figure out how do we create tools that are really easy for them to use especially for the small and medium-sized businesses who they don't have the resources to dedicate against skills based hiring to really learn it and again that's why we put the in-person resources as well but it is it is well received and that time component is really the hardest part. With the companies like do you find that obviously it's like pretty new initiative so there hasn't been a ton of results so far what do they see as like the risks and rewards to you know are they are you trying to make a pitch to them of like this is a good thing to do and it's like important for society or are you trying to make like a business case for them or it's a little bit of both. We're absolutely trying to make a business case and that business case is find people with the right skills fast and cheap and also find people that can grow with your organization so that's the value prop for the employer as they get people that actually know how to do the job regardless of the proxy and hopefully they can do it a lot faster. It comes with the added benefit of solving a large economic challenge but it is absolutely it has to hit their bottom line in order for them to be able to buy into it. One of the things that you mentioned this will be my last question I'll take your questions. One of the things you mentioned that that is like close to my heart is kind of the transparency outcomes reporting etc on the training side. Do you find that the training providers of different industries whether like mechanical things or kind of office skills or whatever are they like oh yeah here's the data or are they like whoa why would we tell you these things or like PS we don't have any idea what they are like what kind of feedback do you get on that conversation. I would say it's totally a mix from we're not we're not going to provide it and those are the folks that are non-training finder to I mean it's really spreads the gamut of what you just mentioned to those that are really interested and probably those that are the most interested are those that want to see what everyone else is doing so that they can improve their own outcomes but it is absolutely across the board and you know the other thing I would say is educators specifically higher education are very difficult organization to work with and it's a pretty difficult challenge to undertake. If I'm a software developer and I'm like yes getting helping people like access medium and high-skilled jobs and like building great careers I want to get involved in like helping do that. Call me. Call Andy. What's your phone number? Seriously come talk to me we have we have a lot of we're actually thinking about redesigning our platform and redesigning our tools and going through a design process so go to skillful.com or find me afterwards and we can chat. And yeah although it's a new initiative the part that I think is still amazing is like LinkedIn has this is a big part of the project and has just this unmatched data set and data access that you can do some like really powerful awesome things with and also have a great software team. And that was part of the vision I think when Markle started skillful they would not have done it without a partner like LinkedIn because LinkedIn does have the data and the scale to get it out to a lot of people. Cool two questions from y'all. Questions questions questions back corner on the left there. So yeah how does that translate for like military coming out of the military sector trying to translate into the private or even public sector do you have anything? So we do not have anything specific to veterans although the concept I think is very fitting for veterans of how do you take the skills that you've acquired while in active duty and translate them to more of a desk job or other jobs that are out there. So we have not specifically focused on veterans except to say that the tools are absolutely useful as well. I was talking to a training provider they train people to repair cell phone towers and he was saying that some of their most targeted user or like student acquisition is with folks who have like paratrooper training are not afraid of like climbing some cell phone towers you know and I think there's like these not things that you wouldn't necessarily see as like A to B connections but then once you start looking at like fundamental skills in there and that's really the hard interesting part of the question is that things start like stitching together in meaningful ways. One more. All right that's it. Thanks Andy. Three, two, one.