 we have Dr. Peter Blair here today and I'll give you a little bit of information about him before we get started. So Dr. Blair is on faculty in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University where he co-directs the project on workforce. He serves as faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the principal investigator at the B Lab. It's a research group with partners from Harvard, Clemson and the University of Illinois-Champaign. His group's research focus on the link between the future of work and the future of education, labor market discrimination, occupational licensing and residential segregation. Dr. Blair received his PhD and applied economics from the warden school at the University of Pennsylvania and his master's in science theoretical physics from Harvard University and his BS in science in psych, well, that's not psychics, physics and mathematics from Duke University. So everyone without further ado, Dr. Peter Blair. Monica, thank you so much for this incredibly warm welcome and I wanna say thank you to everybody on the XPRIZE team organizing committee. Brianna and I have had the opportunity to interact a lot. And for those of you who are joining us, I'm super excited to chat with you because I've read about the amazing companies that you've started and I feel very privileged to get to witness the future of rescaling our labor market right in front of my eyes. Because we're in a virtual environment and because I'm a teacher in an ed school, I like to be interactive. And so I want you to write what's your second most favorite thing that has happened today during the proceedings of the XPRIZE. So just pop that in the chat. What's been your second most favorite thing that's happened today? So let's see who's gonna be the first person to pop something in the chat and don't be shy. The music, yes, I have been feeling the music. Other folks like what's been, what have you been taking away so far? And I'll keep an eye on this too. Hearing the power of story for job candidates. Yeah, that's important. Monica's color coordination, yes, it's on point. I think it's so important that when we're in this hybrid world that we find ways to leverage the multimodality of it. If we were in a standard meeting and you were having this side conversation, it would actually be distracting. But the fact that we have this, we have Zoom technology where we can see people, we can have side conversations. I like to lean into that. And I'm gonna try to make this presentation today very interactive. So I'm super excited to be here to chat with you about some work that I've done with some of my colleagues. And how do we think about reskilling within the context of the U.S. labor market? The insights here, however, we think it can expand to a lot of other contexts. And in fact, some of the work that we've then has started to inform the way that scientists in Kenya are thinking about who is qualified to do STEM related fields. And so for those of you who are tuning into this call from other contexts, I want you to know that the ideas that I'm gonna put forth today are not just relevant in the U.S., but we think about them as having global import in terms of how we think about redeveloping and redeploying the skills that workers have. So let me kick off. I'm gonna share slides with you in just a moment. So today I wanna talk to you about skills, degrees, and labor market inequality. And this is gonna be based on a lot of work that I've done with some colleagues that are opportunity at work. Papua de Broglie, Justin Hecht and Byron O'Geese and the entire team at Opportunity at Work, which is a nonprofit in D.C. that is focused on reskilling. I'm just to tell you like a little bit about my own work. So I think a lot about imperfections in the market's education and the way in which they impact labor markets and what are some of the ways in which we can propose alternative labor market signals that can remedy some of the gaps that we face within our educational and labor markets. This is a picture of the PhD students in my research group. And I like to highlight them because all of you here on this call are part of a team and you recognize that you're only as strong as your team is. The motivation for a lot of our work is that most of the job postings in the United States that they require bachelor's degrees closer to 60% of these job postings. However, when we look at who has bachelor's degrees only 40% of Americans have bachelor's degrees. And so there's this huge mismatch in terms of what are the skills or at least what are the credentials that the labor market is requiring of job seekers and what are the actual credentials that job seekers have? And oftentimes this is referred to as the skills gap. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to turn that notion on its head. And we're gonna try to understand how do we solve for this gap? Certainly it's gonna be impossible just to create a bunch of bachelor's degrees in order to satisfy the demand for quote unquote, skilled or degree labor, right? You would need to increase the capacity of colleges by a factor of about two. That is not gonna happen overnight. And even if it were to happen, it would not be cheap. Instead, what we're gonna propose is how can you identify workers from the population of people who have high school diplomas who are skilled through alternative routes, alternative relative to degrees. And we're gonna call them stars, skilled through alternative routes. I want you to pop in the chat stars, just type that in. I want you to remember that acronym. And this is important because the way in which we talk about workers is going to frame who we think is capable of doing what kind of work and who we want to invest in as companies but also who do we want to invest in as a society. And the goal of identifying these stars who are workers with high school diplomas who don't have college degrees is to try to understand the skills that they have based on their current work and to see whether those skills are sufficient to have them transition to higher wage work. One key component of this approach is that the population of workers who are stars are gonna represent predominantly workers of color and women. And so there's also an equity lens to this reframing of how we think about the skills that workers have in the context of our labor market. I like to start off by thinking about stories. I know that in the chat we saw a comment about how stories are incredibly important. And I wanna reference that by pressing into this story by a woman named Joanne who's an office administrator. This is what Joanne said in an interview that we have with her. I worked at a community college for two decades. I was among the first to be laid off when COVID hit. Even though I had more experience and skills than many of my colleagues, my previous supervisor once told me that had I gone to college, I would be running this community college. I want us to sit for a moment with Joanne's story. How many people do you know like Joanne who have the skills? They're in a job where they're doing the work but they're not being promoted because they don't have a degree, not because they don't have the skills or they don't have the ability to do a higher wage work but precisely because they don't have that college degree. And this is what we're going to be focusing on. In this figure here, you see over time, the percentage of job postings in the United States that requires a bachelor's degree versus the fraction of workers who are currently in those jobs who have a bachelor's degree or higher. And so what you can see is that many of the job postings that are requiring a bachelor's degree are requiring it for jobs where the people currently hold those jobs don't have bachelor's degrees. And so it's not that these jobs themselves need someone with a bachelor's degree to do the job because the person doing it now doesn't have a bachelor's degree. And we call this degree inflation. And so this is something that is contributing to the perception that there's a skills gap when in fact what there is in the labor market is an opportunity gap in terms of recognizing that college degrees aren't needed to do every type of work within the labor market. This degree inflation translates into a wage gap by educational status. If you look over time, in the past four decades, the wages of workers who have high school diplomas but not college degrees, who we're calling stars have remained relatively stagnant at around about $19 to $20 per hour. By contrast, the wages of workers with bachelor's degrees has increased tremendously over this time period. And so they're very real material consequences to being locked out of jobs where you've access to higher wage work. It's income inequality. And that's one of the reasons why we want to focus in on stars. There's another reason why this population of workers are important when we start to think about how do we reskill within our labor ecosystem. Of the 161 million folks who are in the workforce, close to 71 million, 71 million of those are stars. They complete a college but they don't have a college degree. And we want to focus in on what does it look like to provide opportunities for upward mobility for this population of workers, precisely because they can help us to solve some of the skills gaps that we experience in the labor market. The proposal that we do in our work is very simple. It's predicated on the idea that workers will learn by doing it and that they in turn possess the skills that are associated with their jobs and that transitions are possible between jobs with very related skills. Let me give you an example from my own experience. I'm a college professor. The very first time that I taught a class was when I became a college professor. And so I learned on the job. I was given the opportunity to learn on the job because I had a PhD. And in many contexts, a college degree functions as a door opener to give you the opportunity in order to learn. If you look at somebody who was a lawyer, for example, many times when they graduated law school, they don't yet know how to file a brief. They don't yet know how to argue a case in front of court, but they're given that job. And on the job, they learn all of the skills that they need to from people who have that experience. And so our labor market already functions as a place where people both earn and learn at the same time. The question is how do we allow for folks who are stars to both earn and learn in the same way that people with bachelor's degrees and higher can do that on the labor market? To make this concrete, what we've done here is to zoom in on two jobs. So the first is a retail salesperson, which is a low wage job. The second is a customer service representative, which is a medium wage job. And we focused in on the nine top skills that are needed for those jobs as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And for example, persuasion is something that both a retail salesperson need and a customer service representative. Active listening, speaking, service orientation. What you notice here is that the top skills that are needed for a retail salesperson's job, which is a low wage job, are very similar in terms of the ordering, but also the intensity of the importance of that skill as manifested in the customer service representative job. And so our proposal is that workers are learning these skills on the job that they currently have. If we can see them as being skilled through these alternative routes, namely their work experience, then we would say, if I'm looking for somebody to be a customer service representative, I can look in the population of workers who have a retail salesperson as their job experience, even if that person doesn't have a college degree. And so this is a really important thing to meditate on is like, how do we look beyond whether somebody clears the credential hurdle and then look at the actual skills that they have, which we can infer from their prior role and the skill content of that prior role. This is what we do in our work. I want to share with you the story of a star, LaShanna Lewis, who is emblematic of what can happen when we look at somebody based on their skills and not their degrees. It's time that we change the way that we define talent. I'm LaShanna Lewis. I am CEO of Elton Lewis Consulting. I don't have a college degree, but I'm a computer geek. LaShanna grew up in East St. Louis. She had a passion for computers, but she wasn't able to get a college degree. And because she didn't have a college degree, she couldn't even get an interview for a tech job, despite her coding skills. So she was working as a bus driver. I've been working on computers since I can remember, but I always found myself in low wage jobs. And then I always got pulled into doing jobs and duties that are mid to high salary range. So I was able to find a program called Launch Code to help me. And from that, I ended up getting a full-time position at MasterCard, working as an engineer there. After MasterCard, I did start my own business, but at the same time, I got offered a position as a CTO of a startup and director of aerospace IT at a different startup. Not everyone has a four-year degree or can't afford a four-year degree, but everyone should have an opportunity. So maybe we need to look past the pedigree and look more at the skill base. And that's what the STARS movement drives home. STARS are skilled through alternative routes. There are millions of STARS like me just waiting to work, and all they need is an opportunity. Let someone take the first step in changing your company or your organization into something that's more aligned to where the future is going to be. My name is Lashana Lewis, and I'm a STARS. Buy your potential over pedigree and join the STARS movement. I want you to pause for a second and contemplate Lashana's story. And if you know a Lashana in your life, someone who is a STARS, I want you to type in the chat, I know a STARS. To simplify what we do, so in the context of, so you understand that the basic idea, which is that people learn on the job and they learn the skills that are required for that job. And you can measure the content of a person's skill based on what's the skill content of the job that they're currently working at. However, there could be adjacent jobs that can provide higher wages that have very similar skill content. And what we do in our research work is to develop an algorithm that allows us to look at the skill contents of a worker's current job and then identify what are some adjacent jobs that pay higher wages but that have very similar skill contents. And by doing that, we can recognize what are the opportunities for upward mobility for STARS within the legal market. There are some technical details in terms of how we go about developing the algorithm which are described in this bullet point here, but that's not important for understanding conceptually what it is that we do. At the end of the day, what we can get from this procedure is an inventory of the number of STARS based on wages in their origin job. So we can look at workers who are STARS and we can see are they starting off in jobs that are low wage jobs, middle wage jobs or high wage jobs. And then based on the skill content that they have, given where they're currently working, we can see are there medium wage jobs or high wage jobs that they can move to that are not too far removed from their current skill content. And this is going to power a lot of our analysis in terms of describing what is the state of STARS in the legal market. We've come up with a taxonomy that allows us to think about STARS of three different categories. The first are shining STARS. So these are STARS who are already working in high wage jobs, where they're in the top one third of the income distribution. Remember, there's 71 million STARS. Of that 71 million, only 5 million are shining STARS in the sense that they're already working in high wage jobs. When we look at the population of rising STARS, these are STARS who are starting off in low wage work, but they have the potential based on their skill content to move into either medium wage work or high wage work. About 30 million of STARS are reflected by rising STARS. And this is where there's a lot of opportunity to identify who these rising STARS are. Maybe your company's developing a proprietary algorithm that can allow folks to look beyond someone's degree and then identify their skills to match them to jobs where they can earn higher wages and even get opportunities and access to more skill development. And then the balance of STARS are forming STARS who don't yet have the skills. And there's also space in the ecosystem to say, how can we provide these forming STARS with the relevant skills that they need in order to move to higher wage work? When we break this down demographically, we can see that women who are STARS tend to be focused, tend to be overrepresented in low wage work as opposed to high wage occupations. We see the same thing for STARS of color. STARS of color tend to be concentrated in low wage occupations, low wage origin occupations as opposed to high wage occupations. And so when we begin to reconceptualize who is skilled and how we measure skills, there are profound equity implications along with racial lines and gender lines. By seeing STARS, we are going to be seeing the skills of women and people of color in an even clearer way. In addition to the research component of the work that we've done, it's very important to think about how do you engage the ecosystem? We need to start with fundamental insights about the nomenclature of how we talk about workers without college degrees. That in turn is going to inform the extent to which we see them as either having the skills or having opportunities to be reskilled. And then once we reconceptualize the way that we're thinking about talent within the ecosystem, then we can start to move to say, what are some ways in which policymakers and businesses can begin to respond to this new understanding of who is skilled in order to provide a more equitable access to job opportunities within the market? During the summer of 2020, we all witnessed the very brutal and heinous murder of George Floyd. And there were ways in which that ignited this country, our country to think very deeply about issues around racial justice. And something that my colleague Chatham and I did was to think about what are some ways in which companies that are committed to racial equity can do something to promote better access for minority workers. And what we pushed companies to do in the software and the law street journal is to say that you can go beyond just giving money to the black community, but you can actually change the way that you hire and train talent by hiring based on skills and not degrees. And that would allow you to get access to the population of stars who have the skills to do high wage work within your company. We've seen this work and the work of many others in the ecosystem impact public policy where the federal government passed an executive order in 2020 to emphasize the hiring based on skills and not degrees. We saw very recently about a week ago in the state of the union address where President Biden talked about the increasing importance to have workers return through apprenticeships and through alternative routes and for companies and the federal government to hire based on skills and not degrees. And so there's increasing momentum in the pages of our leading newspapers among policymakers in terms of what they're doing and even among Fortune 500 companies. So recently the 110 initiative brought together a coalition of 37 Fortune 500 companies to say we're gonna hire based on skills and not degrees and in particularly use that as a way to drive racial equity by finding talent where in the past we previously did not see talent which is in the population of stars who have been disproportionately women and people of color. And I wanna end by leaving you with a charge as I've read over the amazing companies that you founded the amazing teams that you've assembled you are committed to reshaping the way that we think about skilling the existing workforce and reskilling the existing workforce and shaping the work and the skilled ecosystem of the future. All five of the companies that are represented on this call and I wanna challenge you as you think about your work to think about the ways in which the companies that you develop the algorithms that you pioneer how they can pay a specific attention to the opportunity that you have to recognize the skills of workers who are stars with skills to alternative routes. They don't yet have a college degree but they have skills based on their current work and through that they have opportunities to move to higher wage work. I wanna say a huge thank you for this amazing opportunity to share with you today and I'm excited to see the rest of today's work. So thank you so much for having me here. Thank you. Thank you so much Dr. Blair for making the time we really appreciated and hopefully our teams found some great value in that and just knowing that you guys are on the right track to making a lot of people's lives better and really tapping into stars and putting stars on the path where they need to really have the future that they want, the career they want and make the best life possible for themselves and their families. So we move from that gap being filled with love and opportunity. Exactly. Yeah, thank you.