 Hey everybody welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the delicious dessert and convivial conversations with all of our wise panelists and other guests here. I'm just delighted to see this great rich diversity of people from different schools, different parts of the University of Michigan, other universities and people from all over the state of Michigan. So welcome to the university. We know at the University of Michigan that diversity is a source of our greatest strength and I think this panel reflects this really quite nicely. We have speakers from government, higher education, nonprofit and corporate. You don't normally see all of these people together in the same place but we're delighted that we managed to do that today. They're gonna share some pretty great experiences. I want to introduce the panel. They're talking about current workforce development strategies and future directions. Our moderator and opening speaker is Jeff Donafrio. He's the executive director of workforce development for the city of Detroit. In that role he works with the region's employers, foundations, educational institutions and community organizations to develop programs at bridge industry skill gaps. Prior to this working for Mayor Duggan staff, he was an executive, Jeff was an executive at Ford Motor Company and also worked with Sandra Levin, John Dingo and Jennifer Granholm. Welcome Jeff. Jim Jacobs is president emeritus of Washington, sorry, sorry, forgot where I was. McComb Community College. He got his PhD from Princeton University and he has been with McComb for more than 40 years. He's conducted research, developed programs and consulted on workforce development and community college issues at the national, state and local level and he is also a lecturer right here at the University of Michigan in our School of Education. So welcome Jim. Janine Le Prott is a senior fellow at the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce. Prior to being a senior fellow, she was a CEO for 12 years. She spent the last 20 years researching and promoting innovative economic education and social policies and practices that help people successfully engage in meaningful work and lifelong learning. And last Sharon Miller is a Michigan talent architect for consumers energy. So she represents our corporate sector. In this role, she leads a statewide effort to engage business and industry and talent development through the use of supply chain management principles and the talent pipeline management system developed by the US Chamber of Commerce. So we've got sort of four sectors represented here, diverse views, diverse backgrounds. The format here is that Jeff is going to start us off with a few minutes of opening remarks. We'll then have a discussion sort of question and answer among the four panelists for about 30 minutes and then we'll have questions from the audience. So following the format before, you should have some three by five cards sitting on the tables. If you have any questions, just write them down, wave them around and a student will stop by and pick up your question and pass them on to Jeff. So welcome panelists. Thank you. Well, thank you for having us here and I'm going to try to reserve as much time for the discussion with these really fantastic panelists who are really experts in their fields and also want to make sure that you're part of this discussion too with the questions from the audience. But what I thought I'd do is just start off with a little bit about what's happening in Detroit. So you heard from some really great folks here on the last panel about the view really from the participant side, from the job seeker side. And I think that's really important as we look at where are the gaps and where are things going really well. But let me give you a systematic view. So again, my name is Jeff Donafrio. I run workforce development in the city of Detroit, working Mayor Duggan's office. And actually, about four years ago, it took a leave of absence from Ford Motor Company to do this work. The Ford Motor Company offers up to eight years of public service leave for individuals who want to try to better their community. And I was able to take advantage of that. And what was happening at that time was Mayor Duggan and Tom Wan, who's the head of the jobs and economy team for the mayor. And two business leaders, Cindy Paskey, the President and CEO of Strategic Staffing Solutions and Dave Meeder, who's a Vice Chair of DTE Energy had come to visit me in Washington DC, where I was working for Ford at the time. And they said we have this huge challenge in the city of Detroit. We are 50th out of all 50s of the largest cities in the country on poverty. Worst poverty rate in the country, 40%. We're 50th out of the 50 largest cities on residential employment. Fewest number of adults employed in our city. And that was close to about 47% at that time of our adults between the ages of 16 and 64. We have huge issues with we don't have enough jobs in the city. In fact, we have three residents for every job, whereas cities like Atlanta have two jobs for every resident. We have issues with transportation so that even the jobs we have in the city, two thirds or three fourths are filled by suburbanites coming into the city every year, which means that about two thirds of our population have to travel outside the city for employment every day. And you can imagine right in a city that has such high poverty, the transportation becomes an issue. And a region that doesn't have or hasn't had a history of really working well together on mass transit, it becomes even worse. And so we started looking at all the various issues that Detroit had. And they said, And so we want you to come back and fix this, if you would. So yeah, great. Sure. So I agreed to come back for a year and really take a look and try to help the system be able to chart a path forward. And didn't realize it would be staying around for as long as I did. But first thing we did is we really worked with Corporate First Guild Workforce with Jeanine and Jamie Diamond, who had given a lot of money to the city of Detroit to help us figure out workforce development. So again, that public-private partnership Jamie had been talking to the mayor about workforce development and what he saw around the country. And they funded a study that really laid the groundwork. A lot of those data and statistics I just mentioned were in that study done by the Corporate First Guild Workforce. And so we looked at where we placed around our peer cities. And we said, we've got to set some goals, right? The first thing we do is set some goals of how we want to move this system. We could try a whole bunch of silent approaches to solving things, but that's going to do some good, but it won't actually move the needle for us. So we said our top line goal is to move the number of residents who are employed. We knew that that was going to help with poverty. We knew that would help with household income and a whole host of other issues. And so we said, if we were to try to get from what we're 50 right now, what would it take to get to 49, right? And that was Cleveland. Hopefully no one here from Cleveland here. No one likes Ohio State, right? Okay, good enough. Sorry, sorry. But so even to get to Cleveland, it would take 20,000 more Detroiters becoming employed. We said, but that's not good enough for us, right? We can't just move from 50 to 49. We need to get more into our pure city range. And so we looked at places like Philadelphia and Baltimore and others and said, how do we move from the really the high 40s to the 60% range for residential employment? And that's about where they were Baltimore and Philadelphia. And we set a goal to say that we would need to put 40,000 more Detroiters to work. And the workforce board, which we have in the city that runs and sets a strategy for workforce development is made up of about 50% a little over 50% employers. We have 42 members of that board. And they hail from some of the largest companies in both the region and the city. And we put really C suite members of their leadership team on that board to say, okay, if we're going to do this, employers have to be at the table and they have to be helping us with solutions, right, changing the way that they do business, looking at this differently from a perspective of not just altruism, right? But how do we solve the needs of employers and help make sure that we raise residential employment at the same time? We knew that, you know, subsequently, we would have to track poverty and that would need to go down and household income would and household financial stability would go up at the same time for us to be able to say that we were successful in these efforts. So we really then said there's got to be a strategy involved here really and we took three pillars. First, there's not enough career training and, you know, really industry led trainings that happened within the city. At that time, we were training about 500 people every year in industry career pathways. While we had a about 20,000 to 30,000 unemployed. So again, not going to move the needle there in any great regard. We second said that, of course, one of the reasons why people are not getting jobs and keeping jobs are all of the host of barriers that exist, both for work readiness and then stable employment and career expansion. So we have to go after the barriers at the same time. And then third, we have to drive systems change. We have to look at both the supply side and the various, I think systems that exist at the state, local, federal level, that may hold back an individual from getting a job. So you think about professional licensing, you think about rules around returning citizens and background. That happened at the state level in particular. You think about some of the other things that the on the demand side that corporations do that artificially create barriers to work for individuals, whether it's making sure that they ask for a associate's degree when really just a high school diploma plus some additional training would do things like that. Of course, we heard about banning the box and really keeping individuals with criminal records out at a higher rate. It's very unfortunate, the situation. So we drove that as our third pillar and all of it had to be underpinned by jobs and really a connection to jobs because too much of what was happening in the system and there were about 400 organizations that self identified as being in the workforce system when we came in. They weren't moving the needle and it was more of a train and pray approach. They were doing really, really good jobs and they were well intentioned folks, but they could not leverage each other and they couldn't simply do the massive work that need to be done on their own. So we started pushing into that. So a few of the things I'll mention and then we'll get into the discussion of our panelists, but we did things like work with connected trait and Shona was here to make sure that our summer youth employment program, which was doing a fantastic job expanded because we had to give career pathways and experience in jobs to our youth. And so every year now for the last I think three years, about 8000 summer youth have been employed through the city. We become one of the largest employers in the community. We had to do things like investing career technical education. So Detroit public schools, many of you are from the region and how many are from Southeast Michigan? Okay, so good amount of you know the history and the challenges that Detroit public schools have had. And they had three career technical education schools vocational schools right where there were great career pathways historically from the 1980s on when they were built into apprenticeships into vocations into good paying jobs. But those schools had really fallen by the wayside. And, you know, the city of Detroit is experiencing a construction boom of a like that it hasn't seen in generations. And so one of the highest demand areas that we have is for skilled trades. We heard, you know, about plumbers being an issue, right? There's only about maybe a couple hundred plumbers in the city of Detroit. You know, it's incumbent on us to figure out ways to have more of those individuals both trained, but then also doing the work in the city to help rebuild it. And so Randolph career technical education center was the pathway for construction in the city of Detroit for decades. A lot of a lot of graduates from Randolph was a direct line into the apprenticeship programs had fallen from 700 students to 80 during emergency management of Detroit public schools. They were barely keeping the place open. They didn't have a math teacher. And we know how important math is to those in the skilled trades. So we worked with DT energy and hosts of employers and the public and private sector to say, this isn't right, we've got to change the dynamic here. So we signed a 10 year agreement with the State of public schools. We invested $10 million of funding into renovating that school, upgrading curriculum, buying new equipment. And then we added not just instructors for the high school program, we had an IBW electrical instructor from their apprenticeship program actually come in and teach the high school students. But we added adult programs in the evenings and weekends. So we went from 80 in that school to 310 high school students the following year. And then we added a 300 person cohort for adults as well during the subsequent year. So 600 people being trained. We subsequently signed agreements on two additional career technical education schools. So we'll have about 1500 people who are affected by these career centers in the coming year. We've done things like we put training programs in prison. The first time I had been to prison myself going in and trying to work with prison officials to figure out how it is that we could actually locate some of our training programs in the facility prior to release for individuals. So they had a pathway once they got out. And what we found in that is that it was really challenging once someone got out to get them a job. We kept digging into the data, digging into the data and found that for about 75% of those we trained, they couldn't get a driver's license. So, oh gosh, why is that? Well, it was because of a law that stated pass called Driver Responsibility Fees, which when you got a ticket, let's say for driving around without insurance, the state assessed you $1,000 a year for two years to close a budget gap. And that that was leading to if you didn't pay that debt, you had your driver's license suspended. We found that 360,000 Michiganders had this outstanding fee and 76,000 Detroiters had this. So 18% of our adult population had a debt to the state, which was causing them not to have a driver's license. So we for about a year and a half worked with Lansing, with the governor and a bunch of others got that eliminated finally. And in October of this last year, had 600, excuse me, $600 million worth of debt wiped away in the state of Michigan for folks. I could go on on this because there are so many barriers, there are so many issues that need to be addressed. But the point of this is that it takes all of us really leveraging each other and it takes the public and the private sector coming together to really find creative solutions that are going to solve problems, both for job seekers but for employers as well. And so I wanted to start talking to the panel here about some of what they have seen and perhaps a bit of what they see as opportunities and challenges here in Michigan. So maybe with Janine I could start. Janine, you know, CSW works around the country and has just a fantastic reputation going in and helping workforce development systems. What do you see as really innovative dynamic outside of the state of Michigan? And maybe what do you see here then that's an opportunity to expand? So just a couple of words about my own work, my organization's work. For the last number of years we have been working with some amazing public sector leaders, Jeff and many others doing the work he's describing in the city and there are a number of incredible public sector leaders around the state and in other places that we've had the privilege to work it with. We're also I've been doing some work with funding from from Walmart and I have been working in regions around the country with both public sector partners and retailers to really dig into what are the barriers to to retail worker mobility and what is in the company's ability to do differently and what can the public sector or the community based organizations in each of those places begin to think about doing differently. So while there's a need very much to focus on the front end of the labor market and a lot of the opportunities in terms of just hiring people. We also know that if you're if you're going to have an impact on poverty, educational attainment and economic security or mobility, you also need to really focus on the people in the labor market that are churning and burning themselves out through multiple jobs and working in some cases in multiple sectors sectors of an economy. So part of what I've been also learning more about is what are the opportunities and challenges for focusing on that part of the labor market and what are the the private and public sector solutions for we're working with people who are working. The other thing I've been doing a lot of research and work around is in many of these communities where we're working with the retail sector. They're not Walmart's. There are actually a ton of very small and medium sized companies who are in not only the retail sector but hospitality and other parts of our service based economy. So we have a lot of small businesses who are doing incredibly important work in communities. The direct care workforce. We've got child care workers. You know, we've just got so many parts of our economy that are fueled by smaller and medium sized companies. And so we've been looking at what are some of the solutions to help those companies when you have Walmart's and others who actually do have the resources to make some things happen differently. So the other thing we've been looking at is also how do we center diversity equity inclusion in this work? And I just want to thank the panel that was here preceding us because I feel like you all were embodying what what it looks like for us to have diverse leadership in just wonderful, wonderful ways. And so I think some of the work I'm doing in Minneapolis, St. Paul, where they have six sectors of the economy coming together, including the government sector as an employer. And they are doing two things. They're saying, look, we have to address the labor and skill shortages in our region in Minneapolis, St. Paul. And at the same time, and we can do this, we need to increase equity in hiring and advancement. And so they are not allowing solutions to come forward that don't do both of those things. And and it's hard because, you know, you've got government manufacturers and others who are saying, look, you've got real economic constraints to do the things we want to do from a wage perspective or whatever it might be. But we're willing to roll up our sleeves and we're willing to look differently at, for example, some of the government employers and leaders are saying, look, we will take a look at legacy hiring policies and practices. And if the government can be a leader as a major employer, so can too, our educational institutions in our region. And so can the the healthcare institutions. And so I think we're just starting to see an interesting ripple effect there when a region takes on the critical economic issues facing companies, but also taking on the critical community issues facing a lot of people in that labor market. And so I'm really excited about that work and how I think we're on a path here in Washington County to have leadership stepping into that. And I think, you know, through the work going on in Detroit and other places in Michigan, we're also seeing opportunities. Let me ask you just a follow up question that because I think one of our challenges is if this is seen as altruism by companies, right? It doesn't work, right? It might work for a short period of time, but it's not going to work over the long term. And it's certainly not going to lead to those companies bringing individuals on themselves, really giving them career pathways. How is St. Paul or how are other regions handling that? Yes, great question. So in the case of the healthcare sector, so I think this is true both in Minneapolis, St. Paul and what I'm seeing happening even in southeast Michigan, Trinity Health on the west side of the state is a great example. You know, I think they have realized that diversity, equity and inclusion is a fun is a driver for their organization's success across a number of indicators. So they not only want their workforce to reflect the communities they're trying to serve, they just they have data and information that says if we have a more diverse workforce, including, you know, women in different positions, people with disabilities, people from different ethnic backgrounds, you know, and other kinds of diversity, that's all good for you know, that's part of our that's driving improvements in all levels of organization. So I think we're seeing in health care, an understanding that that's part of the business bottom line. I think other sectors of the economy are also starting to see that as we're, you know, the labor market is tightening. And they're having a hard time finding new workers. You need those non traditional candidates. That's right. And you're more willing to take that's right, you know, other options on hiring practices and things like that. That's right. And so I do think that and then there are certainly some leaders in from the business community are showing up because they believe it's the right thing to do. And then they bring along their HR counterparts and others in their organizations who are also telling them it's not just the right thing to do, it's actually because it's it's it's part of it helps us meet a number of our bottom lines. Sharon, what's what's the consumer's experience on it? You guys have been a leader in workforce and trying to think differently about how it is that you create a talent pipeline. And you know, are those have you looked at the barriers within your own company and tried to address that? I mean, is that been a real focus of consumers? It's actually a great question, Jeff. And thank you and good evening, everybody. I'm I want to give just a little like Jeanine did background about myself. I am a 30 year community college person retired. And I have an encore career now at consumers energy. This is my third year there. And when we talk about looking at the barriers at the company, it's not just the barriers at the door. It's the barriers once you come in the company. And what we've looked at the data, when we look at how have we done on diversity and inclusion data? We've had diversity office for a long time. We spend a lot of money sponsoring a lot of things doing a lot of different things. The needle has moved very little in how we're doing. And so we started looking more closely at that data. And we're looking at best practices. And it's an inside job for us. We need to change our culture so that when we do bring in people of diverse backgrounds, whether it's a veteran, a disabled individual or someone from a socioeconomic background, their supervisor knows how to work successfully with them and how to coach and how to continue to bring that person to a success point. We strive to be a company that wants you to bring your whole self to work. And we preach that our CEO talks about that. And that's for every level of the organization. But it's harder to walk the walk with certain characteristics. And so we take I'm in the Learning and Development Division. My title is Michigan Talent Architects. So we look at it from an internal and an external perspective. So some of what we've done internally is we have employee resource groups. So we have one focused on people with disabilities. We have one for old people. We have one, you know, they have different names. That one's called generations, I think. There's another one, capabilities. There's one for LGBTQ. There's different groups. But what we try to do is use them as a pool where we can get a better understanding. There's one for veterans where we can understand what are the issues that we're missing on. Where is it? I loved what the woman from Walmart said about listening and designing for their world as employees. And so that some of the work that we're doing internally, externally, you know, as a company, there's the altruistic agenda. But for us, that translates into what's our foundation doing? Because that's their agenda, you know. And so the foundation funding different efforts from early childhood and reading programs, all the way through first robotics and a number of other things that we do in communities all over the state of Michigan is a big part of what we try to do on this agenda. But we also, they hired somebody like me. They have a lifelong workforce development professional. And they knew they wanted someone with that background. Because for companies and what Jeff's been talking about to partner successfully, you need to understand the systems. You need to understand workforce development, the vocabulary, the ins and outs of funding cycles. There's a lot of hoops to jump through if you're going to do it successfully. And so they brought in someone like me. They have also brought in, we have a former high school principal. We have teachers and counselors that work in our learning and development department that have become part of my talent pipeline team. And what we do is we form partnership programs for our highest most critical in demand positions. And we develop training programs that feed directly into internships and permanent employment at the company. Since I've been there in the three years I've been there, we've hired 300 people, 158 line workers as of last week, which is a job that starts at $60,000 a year, but there's not a line worker in Michigan that doesn't earn more than that. Right. We have 76,000 miles of electric lines that can go out in the storm. We have 27,000 miles of pipes underground. So we hired 158 of the line workers and we have a veterans boot camp. So it's a three week long program where participants come directly out of the military. They can be out for as long as they want to as long as they can handle the job physically. They go stay at Fort Custer in the barracks there. It's familiar and comfortable for them. And we put the partner with our union. They go through a training program that's three weeks long. If they complete that and can pass the physical assessment, we'll bring them in the door. And from there, they have six months where they're mentored and they are coached. And at the end of that six months, if they do well, they too enter in at about $30 an hour working with nothing more than that training that we gave them. That's it. So yay. Yeah, we're happy about that too. You know, and the two programs that we've developed, we have a 98 percent retention rate on those. So it's not just what we did in developing a training program. It's what the partners in that process did for us. They know how to pull the right people in, provide them with the right supports, coach them through the education experience, and help us to get a person whose work ready. Because in fact, that's my job. My job is not, you know, your job, you talked about the conditions in the city of Detroit, poverty, and all the other issues that are there. I work for a corporation who's not that's not their job. Their job is to provide energy to you all. My job is to make sure that there's a talent pipeline of qualified people at the door. And as much as I can make that a diverse, qualified pipeline, that's what I want to do. And so we do all these things on the outside and all these things on the inside, but the door, the ticket to entry is still being qualified. Yeah, I think it's interesting, you know, because if you don't have people like yourself in these companies who are really pushing the company to reassess how it does business, who it's bringing in, really trying to look at that, you have a tendency to overlook a lot of really obvious barriers. I'll give you an example of that. We were working with our health care systems in the city of Detroit and saying, okay, let's design a training program, right? Because that's the issue. Just need to get skills for some entry level jobs. We can get a whole bunch of people coming in. And we got through about a six or eight month process of designing that training program. And at the end of it, we said, what is the thing that's going to keep Detroiters out of this besides skills? And they said, oh, that's easy. We can't verify their high school diplomas. It takes six months to actually get a verification that someone has a high school diploma because of some of the issues that our public schools has. They have a million student records, they're in different buildings, you know, it's hard to find. And so generally, what happens as a hiring manager probably just, you know, passes over the Detroiter because I know it's going to be so hard. Or they rescind a job offer because they can't wait that long. We said, my God, you know, we're working on skills. And really what we need to be looking at is just verification of high school diplomas and we'd have a huge, huge issue change. I think that the magic that happens when a group of employers get in a room together and start talking to each other and to the systems is really where a big part of this problem lies. And getting them in the rooms is the hardest thing to do. Get them to stop and say, this will help us on a multitude of levels if we'll invest this time. But they have to see it to believe it. They need another business to say to them, we got 308 people out of these two schools. How about that? You know, and then they start to go, Oh, maybe there's something to this. And it's, but it's really to that top level leadership of a CEO pushing that down, right? So just so you all understand, too, we, we saw the diploma verification issue because a bunch of CEOs came together, funded scanners, you know, funded a new system to get that taken care of. So again, if you don't have that top level leadership, it's just not going to, not going to permeate the company. Let me shift, though, to talk about higher education since we're on this wonderful campus and this very expensive building, I'm sure, named after lots of people that provided a lot of money. So we, we have a panel that's obviously stocked with some community college experience, but Jim Jacobs is really, I think, the expert on both higher education community college. Jim, what role does do community colleges play really with this equity question? How do, how do you really drive workforce development, private public partnerships through community colleges? So much has been said about even just access to college and college debt and the issues with graduation for individuals who are in poverty or have lots of barriers. I mean, how do community colleges need to approach that? How does, how does the four university system need to do that? Well, I think you start with a couple of important points about not just what the present system is, but how are we evolving? What's the future of work? What's it going to look like? And a great deal of what Sharon talked about in terms of our company and Jeanine talked about in terms of the questions of how institutions work together is really needs to be put into a context of what's important for the, what's evolving? And what's evolving is that the traditional way of looking at training, which was something that the companies did in education, that's something that the schools did, has now been combined in a way that one piece of training is in fact education, but one piece of education is also training. And the community colleges that understand that and can work in that space are those that are going to be successful. And I would also argue that the four-year institutions who can understand that combination can also be successful, because what's changing about jobs, and I think this is, again, to put it into a dynamic context, is that individual, the individual workplace is being altered not just by technology, but by work organizations and by the specific demands on companies. The result is that there's a lot more things going on in the workplace that individuals are learning from. It's not just apprenticeship, it's all sorts of things that go on on the job. To prepare people for that, to prepare for their workplace experience, educational institutions need to integrate some of those skill sets and some of those, you know, very important skills, which are sometimes in liberal arts classes, but often in technical classes. And the community colleges that can do that best can work together, both combine the technical specifications with the broader learning issues are those that are going to do well in this situation. And if I could just bounce it into Michigan for a little bit, we have a particular challenge ahead of us in Michigan. Here we have a state where population is not growing as much. We have a significant commitment to our schools for young people to make the transition. But part of what Jeff was talking about and part of the demands of companies now are going to be how do we take adults, adults who have not had any college experience? How do we get them into a situation where they can see post-secondary education as an important component for their future? And that requires, I think, something like a community college that really focuses on the needs of adults. It's not that adults are all that different than young people, but they do have different learning strategies. They do have different demands on them. And that the community colleges that can do that best and understand the diversity of the adult experience and come up with learning capabilities are going to be the ones that are most successful. And from Michigan, one of the things that I am very optimistic about is that new governor has kind of targeted the question of adults and adult education as an important part of our future education. And we're going to need lots of talented people from four year institutions to help us figure out how to do this in the most effective way. Yeah, and Jim and I both worked on the governor's transition trying to figure out what kind of policy and priorities she should be looking at potentially in the higher ed space. You know, the post-secondary education goal that she's set for the state of Michigan, which is to have 60 percent of our adults adult workforce with a post-secondary degree by 2030. You know, we've seen that and she proposed two programs really to help achieve that, right? The reconnect program and the opportunity scholarship. Reconnect being really targeted at those adults who don't have associate degrees and trying to get them into a community college to figure out how we could get them an in-demand credential. And then opportunity scholarship, which is really that pathway for high school graduates into a two year or four year. These are based off of Tennessee and the Tennessee Promise and the Tennessee Reconnect Program. And what we see there is really a challenge with still those individuals who are close to poverty in poverty have, you know, life issues being able to still be successful and achieve those credentials. What do you think needs to be driven into the process here if let's say those programs are passed to make sure that we do have folks who are achieving that credential and then building a career out at? I think the most important part is what goes on up front. The wraparound services that are going to be necessary for adults to feel comfortable in higher education institutions, to have a way in which career pathways can be proposed, to have a situation where individuals can work at a certain pace, to utilize the kinds of technologies and learning systems that we know work, but put them into kind of a sequence so that individuals can chart their own progress and feel confident about their learning capabilities. I mean so much in the past as school been sort of separated from work that people who didn't do well in school kind of assumed that school wasn't part of work. And I think what we're especially going to see in Michigan is the changes that are going to go on in the auto industry, that school and work are going to have to be combined in new ways. So the task of setting this up, I mean certainly the idea of a free two year education for an adult is certainly a good draw. And I don't think that's going to be, it's going to be necessary, but it's not sufficient. What really needs to happen is that we need to look very carefully at how we're utilizing our counseling services, our career pathways and relying on our companies to really be able to chart this out. And let me just say something about this which I think is also a real opportunity and Sharon's company is a good example of this. In the past, the assumption was that the companies always knew what they needed and just would come out and just say, well, we need X kinds of people, just you go Jeff, you find those people and we'll hire them. The reality is, as Sharon, I think, in the test, I hate to say this in the business school, but business doesn't often know what it's doing. That they often... Don't do workforce planning. Yeah, right. And I want to use a quick example just from my own experience, which I always like to just point this out. And this is not a knock on businesses in general, but just gives you an example. You know, we at Macomb had a large extensive apprenticeship program, et cetera, and we worked with a lot of small manufacturers. So the starting wage for an apprenticeship in some of these places was $12 or $13 an hour. We also ran a program from the Department of Labor to train robotics technicians in six weeks. They started work at $17 an hour. And when we heard the complaints from the companies that, well, they couldn't find enough people to work in the apprenticeship program at $12 an hour for four years, we just said, well, what do you think? If you were a person, you had a choice of taking a program for six weeks to get a $17 an hour job or four years to get a $12 an hour job, which one would you choose? And they said, well, you know, we never thought of it that way. And the reality is that in many cases, companies still see training as a cost. It's on the cost side. It's not it's part of what you try to narrow down. It's an add on. And don't see it as an investment. And I think that those those companies are going to be less less likely to be successful in the future. The question of investment is really important. And there's where again, just to tie it back to I think one of the themes that correctly is being done at this conference, the questions of diversity. Sure, it's hard. Sure, it takes time. But the question is the investment and what you get back as a result of that. And in a state where the population is not growing, where we have substantial amounts of adults without any college degrees or even close to sometimes not even a high school degree. If we don't emphasize that the wealth of this state in the future for everyone, even the students at the University of Michigan is going to be suspect. So I think we're seeing a resurgence of looking at it. It's not just the technology driving it's the business organizations. It's the way in which companies start to see training as an investment, as opposed to seeing it just as a cost. It's great. Let me do this because I want to get to your questions. And if you do have any questions, please just make sure to write them down on these cards and someone will be around. I think we've got a question up here. I'm going to ask the workforce panel just for 30 seconds. Give me something that excites you and in this space with public sector, private sector partnerships and this sort of changing nature of work and then give me something that worries you. Just, we can mull on that. Meen, do you want to start? Sure, I'd be glad to. So I think building off of what Jim was speaking to, there's really an opportunity to redefine roles and commitments and investments from the private sector side, public sector side. And I think what individuals are prepared to put into this as well. And I feel like we have a great opportunity here in the state of Michigan to even rethink the way we are packaging funding and policies and practices that support small and medium sized businesses in particular. And I think, Jim, a lot of those small and medium sized businesses are actually the places where we're seeing work based learning in play because I think they have to be agile and they have to be sort of integrating the learning on the job all the time. And so I feel like we can't lose sight of the number of those businesses here in the state. And I think we've got to think about ways in which partnerships between those companies, not just the big ones and the educational institutions could be supported. And then the other thing I'm excited about in the city of Detroit, you all have been rethinking how your how the system and how your policies and programs support career coaching and navigation differently. And I feel like there's a huge need and opportunity to rethink how we offer career coaching supports and services statewide, not necessarily only through educational institutions, I think it needs to be made available outside of educational institutions and maybe even outside of some of our typical public agencies or programs. I bet I mean, I know I would love a career coach right helping me along. I'm sure a lot of people here would say you'd love to be able to talk to somebody even yourself to think about individuals who have to navigate a system that is not very clear and certainly doesn't provide the OK, you take this course and you will get this job making this much. And here's your next progression that just doesn't exist out there. And what do you think? What excites me is that there are companies, big companies like consumers and Accenture and DTE and Rock Financial and I could go on and list companies that are now workforce planning. They may not have before done that work. They're starting to understand it. If you're looking to study something that we need more of, workforce planning is one of those things. That excites me a lot and that there's real engagement that is starting to happen in the business community in this space. What worries me is that Michigan has a history of an economy that looks like this. And these kinds of programs, these kinds of efforts, these kinds of things work when it's a tight labor market. But as soon as the labor market becomes more fluid, it employers go back to their old behaviors. And that worries me. It doesn't worry me so much at my own company because they're in. But I think that there are companies right now that will revert back to what they used to do, which is just grab the next available person who can come in who's qualified and not worry about the longer-term pipeline strategies. So that's my short answer. I could keep going, but I'm going to stop. Jim, just quickly. I think what's exciting is two things. One, the nature of the collaboration. For the first time, people are not only getting together, but they're saying, we don't have all the answers. We can work those answers out together. As part of that, I think you're going to start to see institutions, particularly in the education area, really develop much more sophisticated and dense relationships with the workforce systems as well as the company. Danger, and I think Sharon has sort of said this, the danger is looks good now. Unemployment is relatively low, is a huge demand. Again, the state like Michigan, with a population not growing, is in a real interesting bind in terms of future, where that future workforce is going to be. The question that I think will hover over us is whether we can be consistent over a long period of time to make this happen. And hopefully, you know, there will be a recession, there'll be a downturn, but we need to stay the course. And that's one of the things I think that is very, very important about meetings like this. We continue to move with the same definitions and the same ways in which we think about things and take the long term perspective. Thank you. So let's let's try to ask some questions here. I think the first one was that we're hearing that managers oftentimes and employers don't understand how to overcome barriers and that they may not be equipped to provide mentorship, support and career pathways to their employees. How do we solve this? What what could you know, the public workforce system, private nonprofits do? Anybody want to take that one? So career pathway and career coaching is the managers. It can be a manager's job. And our IT department recently, we made a requirement that every supervisor have a career planning conversation with their employees twice a year, where they're looking at what are the training skills that they need to have and then making that available to them. But when it comes to working with folks who have other barriers that they bring to work, I don't know that managers are ever we don't want to turn them into social workers. That's not what they're there to do. There's a program called employer resource networks or business resource networks, where you can basically bring a social worker. Shamar mentioned this from that mistaken. Um, you can you can bring someone who does that and understands the community resources that are available into your organization. And they're they're confidentially to work with employees and the manager can point you to them. What was surprising in a company recently that I was talking to about this that participates in it was that it was not only their low income employees that were needing those services, that their middle management and upper management were living on the edge quite often as well. Now granted, the edge looks different at that level. But the fact is they still need credit counseling. They still need some of the types of supports that were made available through the ERN. So if you're you know, that's a I think a new tool that's realistic, that could really be helpful for companies that dive deep into the space. Just to add, I think the HR function of companies is going to change or is changing. That it isn't just what a person does on the job. It's the experience that they have in the community and the experience that they have in their families, etc. So you know, you take all the issues that we know exist, you know, quote in the outside world, they exist inside of companies. So you have to have much different kind of HR strategy. It's not just HR selecting people or a particular job. It's handling their experiences and their lifelong learning that's going to go on. So I think part of part of the this I'm sure is true here at the business school, the way in which managers are trained and developed is exceedingly very different. In fact, Jeff, that fact that Ford has an eight year period where you can go off and work in the public sector. That's a model that could be worked in many other countries. You have to take a pay cut to do it. But you know, I do think we have examples from around the country where public funding is going to support supervisors and managers and learning some new things and developing tools related to her pathway and mentoring work. I also think the staffing solution group that's here, and I'm sorry, fierce, fierce, like that's great, interesting model. They're not just focused on higher, you know, getting somebody a job, they're really trying to figure out how to how to put the difference out of services there in front of that business. And so we need more examples like that, not less of everybody who touches business and industry being really creative about how they're what they're offering. I think that's good. And, you know, certainly this is a topic that we go on for a long time about. And I think there's a lot of emphasis and need for it. I want to switch because there's there's just a host of questions. So there's a couple questions about the robots taking over. And what are we going to do here? One, is it real? Is it going to cost or create new jobs? And then how do we adapt Jim? You want to let me tell this is my one of my favorite areas. First, the most interesting part about this is that, you know, when we talk about the future of work is always somebody will say, you know, 80% of all the truck drivers will disappear in the next 15 years, etc. One thing that doesn't disappear is that there's so many people talking about the future of work, they have a future. Now, there's no question that certain jobs disappear and other jobs expand. But the issue of even even thinking about this as just a technology driven question is wrong. That is, it's not an issue of just that what happens with technology is that it produces different kinds of options and it really depends on how technology is integrated within the companies and how it's, you know, met matched with human resources, etc. For all the people who have been displaced by robotics inside of automobile plants, etc. There's been a growth of other kinds of jobs in the auto industry. And in fact, you know, one of our challenges in Michigan is that we have too few people who understand cyber security and networking and artificial intelligence questions and that we're actually importing people from Southern California or in the Bay area to help us figure these things out. That in general, the that there is displacement, but there's also opportunities. And the question is how you handle both sides of this? Certainly there are people who are going to be affected by robotic technologies. But the tendency is to overemphasize that and under emphasize the kinds of options, you know, that that can occur. Again, then the one area that I think all of us are familiar with the first automatic teller machines were introduced in the United States in the 19 late 1970s and early 1980s. And the assumption was that those automatic teller machines would eliminate people out of banks. Well, the actual the actuality is that what the automatic teller machines meant is that you could put them in every community and you put banks in every community. So actually employment went up in the banking industry. The question of wages, though, and preparation for that are real questions. So let me ask because I think that's that's a really a question of adaptability right within individuals. So how many people here would say how many people are employed here? And not just in academia, learning great things. Okay, great. How many people are employed in the same industry that they started out in? Okay, so much pure. So most of us have had to adapt right in some way. Janine, how do you see that playing out? I mean that adaptability, you know, I think this is what sort of that reconnect program, the other sort of work we're doing on creating adult trainings, even the pipeline into consumers. Where do we see this playing out, you know, around the country? So just a little answer to your question, but I do know that Walmart invested in that report, the McKinsey study, because I do think there are some real concerns about worker company, company closure and worker dislocation, especially in the retail sector, because I think we are seeing some real changes. And jobs aren't necessarily going away. They're changing, which in some cases are actually a really good thing. I mean, I think there are workers who are realizing that, you know, there's a need for these digital literacy skills, there's a need for a greater customer service, the social skills, the communication and the need to know, have the skills to learn, learn on the job, learn, you know, whether it be learning, learning to learn in school or learning on the job, those are all like the foundational set of adaptability or resilience skills that I think we're starting to see are critical for so many jobs. And so the more we see programs like integrating those sets of skills, regardless of if it's a program for preparing people for working manufacturing or healthcare, whatever, I think we need to see more of that kind of foundational skill building to help people adapt. Karen, do you want to weigh it? Just real quick, I'll say that we will not lay off a person because technology is replaced their job. We know that person and we know they're a good, high quality worker, we're going to work with them to reskill internally and find a place for them. And I think in a tight labor market that's what companies tend to do, whether it's an entry level worker, it's a high level worker. We close a coal fired plant, every single person in that plant has a job somewhere in the company for them. The other piece to it, we see human struggle at work. We see how hard people work today. It's crazy how hard people work. Technology can help with that. I'm all for it. And I think our company, our HR department, looks at it that way. Reduce the human struggle, increase safety. That's those are benefits to advances in technology. It's not just robots, it's digitization. It's all the things that are there. There's a very positive upside to it. And in this labor market, people aren't just going to cut them loose if they if they need people, they're going to hold on to what's familiar and retool them more often than not. Well, and I think a bigger question that we could, you know, probably spend another conference on is as workers become more productive with technology, the wages follow. Right? Do we do we have a subsequent increase in wages then? Because that's not what we've seen necessarily recently. Jim, let me end with with this question because I think you have a lot of people in this room who have four year degrees or beyond. How do you make sure that's adaptable in the marketplace moving forward? Yeah, I think that that's a real challenge. I mean, there's a tendency in the four year sector to still see the degree as the key to success. The degree is part of the key to success. It's the degree and what you know inside that degree, what kinds of capabilities and adaptabilities you have that are going to be very, very successful. So I think you're going to start and it is interesting. And I'll just kind of tie this to something which I'm sure everybody here has witnessed. You know, the scandal that goes on with all these parents are trying to get their students into certain schools because, you know, the school has a high reputation. Hopefully robotics and the new technologies are going to start to change all of that. It isn't going to be whether you went to the University of Michigan, but what did you learn in the University of Michigan, what kinds of things that you studied, what kinds of skills that you learn will become important for your success. So it's the programs and what's inside those programs. And now we have the opportunity with the kinds of big data that we can, you know, uncover is to know that. So a degree is important, but it's not the sole part of it. It's a degree with what kinds of skills in, you know, you have within that degree. Organizational behavior and psychology from the University of Michigan. All right, well, that's going to have to be the last word. Thank you very much to the panel. Thank you all for being here today and for your questions.