 Yes, thank you so much Brie. I have the honor of introducing some of our esteemed panelists today. I'll get started with some introductions then we'll get into this panel. So first up I'd like to introduce Andre Green, the Executive Director of SkillWorks, a nationally recognized Workforce Development Funders Collaborative, where he brings a whole wide variety of experience in secondary education, workforce development, public policy analysis and advocacy, data analysis and technology support, really addressing issues of housing instability and homelessness, and expanding funding for arts education. Next up we have Dr. Chris Feeney, the Senior Workforce Strategist at the Labor Market Analytics firm, MC Burning Glass. Chris specializes in workforce and economic development, strategic workforce planning, comprehensive planning and data analysis. Chris's work on projects related to industry sector strategies, labor market demand and workforce availability for workforce development boards throughout the U.S. He has long been interested in this sector and his dissertation focused on realist influence on economic mobility among disenfranchised young adults. Then we have Katherine McKinney, Deputy Director of Workforce for JBS SoCal. She started her career in high-tech sales with a startup, then built an e-commerce site, spent a couple of years as an investment banker and then became COO of another startup. And she's now working in nonprofits via workforce JBS SoCal. Founded in 1931, JBS SoCal offers individuals, businesses and agencies high-quality programs related to job seeking, career planning, skills assessment, training and retraining. And we have Jomira Herrera. She was born in Orlando, Florida to two parents who always believed that education was not only important but it was a priority. And it's one of the few things that no one could ever take from you. With her mindset, she's currently a partner at Reach Capital. She was able to go to Stanford and really fell in love with education and ended up getting an in-man education policy, organization and leadership studies. She started her career as an operator in an ed tech startup called Bloomberg and eventually started a career in venture capital, which is where she finds her in itself now at Reach Capital. She was previously at Cowboy Ventures. We spent a lot of her time working with consumer, internet and marketplace companies. So I want you all to please, please give a round of applause virtually for our esteemed panelists as we get to our panel discussion today. We're really excited to have you all to have all of our panelists come on, show you beautiful faces. And I can get us started with a couple of questions. So excited to have you and thank you so much for sharing your time today. Now, as we get started, we know what's going on in the world, what's going on. The pandemic definitely has turned workforce development on its side a little bit. We're already contending with, you know, the fourth industrial revolution and the use of technology, which is sometimes rendering some opportunities obsolete. But we want to really talk about creating a labor market with pathways for workers through incentivization, which is kind of what we do here at XPRIZE. We're incentivizing people to create solutions to the world's problems and incentivize workers to try new things, put them on those new career paths. And so I'm going to ask the first question and feel free to unmute and, you know, answer. So looking right now, learning and innovation, they're really at the heart of labor market functions and employer-worker relationships. I would love to know how important are training and rescaling programs and preventing worker turnover. So feel free to unmute yourself if you have an answer to that question. I'm happy to take a first stab at that. I think the generalizing answer, the general, you know, belief around how important training is, it's incredibly high. And we're seeing lots of companies, especially companies that have a significant degree of employees that are either going to need rescaling because their jobs are going to become obsolete or are seeing that even in the roles that they're in now, they're going to need increased training to continue to grow within those roles. We're seeing increased investment across the board in that type of training. And you're seeing even some of the largest companies, at least in the U.S., investing in that in really meaningful ways. Walmart, Lowe's, Disney, Target, all of them over the past few years have announced massive investments in ensuring increased training and increased access to education for most, a lot of their frontline employees, including their corporate employees as well. So it's an incredibly important piece. And we're seeing employers respond to that. Thank you. But anyone else likes to chime in on that? Especially seeing how she's mentioning some very big companies that are now pivoting their strategy to invest more in their staff and more of an upskilling model. Monica, I think that's the point that you just made is the importance right now. All employers are looking at how do they retain their employees. And so one of the biggest benefits that we're seeing across the board is people want to feel invested in. And so when individuals are paying, or companies are paying for those individuals to go through training, whether it's rescaling or upscaling in their current roles, they feel more dedicated to that company. And so it's a retention effort. And so it's even more important today than ever. I love that you talk retention, but I think what was down said was sometimes that human touch and the capacity to feel valued, to feel respected, to feel that someone's pouring into you. That creates community, that creates connection. So sometimes there could be a disconnect because the employer isn't pouring into and valuing and investing in their staff. So anyone else would love to give their take on that? Sure. Sure. I think I've heard everything that Dr. Lane just said. And I think it's actually more acute now in the, I don't want to say post COVID unfortunately, but so let's say post lockdown world where a lot of the entry level, I never use word low skill, but let's say low value skill, low value skill jobs got designated last year. But one of the things we're finding as jobs come back is that all these workers realized they don't have to take those jobs anymore. And so like, we find ourselves in this weird place where there's both a labor shortage and high unemployment because people feel correctly that if they're going to go to work, those jobs have value, that job shouldn't put their life at danger. And that job should actually be a path out of poverty. So we're going to find that employers who can't offer those things aren't going to find workers. And so if you're not providing some way people to grow and develop in your jobs, it's going to be hard to find workers going forward. Yeah. And it really harkens to the competitive nature of the industry right now where you have to, as an employer, set yourself up to be attractive to prospective employees. Very important. Thank you so much for sharing, Andre. Anyone else like to provide feedback? And if not, we can definitely move to talk about finding ways to pour into staff and make them feel valued. But are monetary incentives more effective than non-monetary incentives? You know, you know, training, covering training would be technically a non-monetary incentive as opposed to everybody who signs on get $1,000, you know, sign on bonus. Do we find in your experience or from things that you've read or come across as an expert that monetary incentives are more effective than non-monetary incentives? Also, what is needed for a successful incentive program and rescaling upskilling workers? I'll take a step up that. We deal with the most vulnerable. And so my experience is that it depends on the cohort. The most vulnerable do very much respond to monetary incentives. There's no question about that. But as you move, if you will, the chain in terms of education and because we have a variety of clients, but as you move up the chain, people are more knowledgeable about the value of education. So oftentimes there's no incentive needed at a higher level, but at the most vulnerable, absolutely, absolutely. There's no question. Yeah, I'd like to build on that. I think, you know, I always say we know the cause of poverty is not having enough money. And so if you don't have money, yes, you're not going to have enough money to get to it. You are not going to be able to get to that point in time. This is the one factor of that. That you is having more money. There does come a point, however, when, you know, I'm not serious, I have enough money. That point comes. I haven't hit yet. But where a thousand dollars. Is one factor among many say, in this decision making process. And as. Was this data, I think sometimes that was important value. Like, if you were about how to make rent next month, $1,000 really matters. If you're trying to figure out how to, eventually, the place where you can buy a house, the long-term value of the work you're doing changes matters, right? But like, as far as, you know, what makes it successful incentive, I think it's knowing that, right? Like it's knowing who your audience is. If you were trying to figure out how to get people to take a $20 an hour job, the cash incentive really works. If you're trying to find the best person for us to take a job, other incentives probably come into play. Yeah, I think just to add a wrinkle to this, like it goes back to the basics of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Like at the basic level, if you don't have safety, shelter, like what you need to actually just succeed as a human, that is you're not like necessarily going to be motivated and incentivized by some form of economic incentive. The higher you go up, the higher you get to self-actualization, right? And so then therefore, all of a sudden, what you're motivated by starts to change. And so that's how we kind of have to think about it is the range of wraparound supports and the range of the support that you need is just gonna change the higher you get up that those levels of need. Yeah, thank you. Dr. Laney, Catherine, anything to give? I know we're talking about what's needed depending on the needs of the person. So what does that look like in an instance program that's tailoring itself to the actual demographic, like Andre said, that they're looking to recruit for these opportunities. You might have to take the words right out of my mouth. I think that the reason why those incentives are so enticing in the beginning is because you're just trying to meet those basic needs first. So if someone says that you're, if I go work here for 30 days and there's a $1,000 sign-on bonus, then I may do that because over the next 30 days, I need to pay rent as what was mentioned. So, but the goal here is to help individuals start to think about, I mean, we use the terminology growth mindset starting to think in the forward, but we gotta meet those basic needs first before we can really start to strategize and work with individuals about what does their career look like long-term and how do the skills that they can learn in a specific job now, how do those transfer into other occupations or opportunities that are helping them climb up the economic ladder? I will just tell you that the majority of our clients have their basic needs met. That's not the issue. It's the mindset, it's the ability to see past the basic, that they have section eight vouchers, they have homes, they have, I'm just, we serve them almost as well, but in general, I would say it's, I read Jamara's, I listened to Jamara's background, her parents instilled in her the value of education. If you don't have that, then you don't have it. You need someone, you need another incentive. It's not, if you don't have a value on education, then $1,000 will do. That's our experience, is that people aren't, they're not in an environment that values education. So you're fighting against their minds, the way they, what they value, their values. So that's what we see anyway. I mean, yeah. Can I just comment just a little bit? I think it goes back to, actually, what are the rules in this, right? Like if you are in a position where education hasn't provided you with long-term success, then it beggars belief that people assume that, right? But I think in our experience, we look at the data, the data shows that sometimes education doesn't do it, right? We did a report with Skollink actually, with Michelle here, and we found that in Boston, for example, black people with a social degree made less than white people with a high school diploma. So like, you know, there's this belief that education is this great equalizer. But the reality in America for the last 30, 40 years, and it has not been that. It has been actually a great de-unequalizer. It's been a great creator of class division. And so like, I always remind people that poor people, unemployed people, people who are under-skilled and religious are just as rational as the rest of us. They're just responding to different incentives and different punishments. And so our job, and frankly, workforce development hasn't been good historically, is to change the incentives from, and it's even true in our, as our generation, right? We talk about our placement rate, right? Which is always three months, six months. But you don't get out of poverty in three months, six months. So we have to change incentives where people can think about three-year, five-year, 10-year plans. And we haven't done that yet. And I hope that's one of the things we here as part of doing now is changing the incentives so people can think in long-term. Definitely. I see what you're talking about, Ann Andre, with meeting people where they are, engaging their needs. There's not a one-size-fits-all. I think right now we're stuck as an industry in a one-size-fits-all. This is the program. And you must follow it to the letter, A, B, C, X, Y, Z. We're recognizing this in all humans, all people. We all have new ones. We have history. And so trying to find ways that tailors the experience for upscaling and rescaling to specifically meet the needs of the individual is very, very important. And now, are you guys seeing any places in, or organizations or programs that are outside of rapid rescaling, of course, that are looking at meeting the individual needs and trying to step away from the more bureaucratic way of looking at everything and really looking on a micro-level at ensuring success on an individual basis to make sure no one is followed through the cracks or that there are barriers, there are meetings that are not being, you know, overpain? Yeah. I mean, I understand that there's other folks here familiar with Riova, but that's the Workforce Opportunity and Investment Act passed under Obama that provides a ton of funding for workforce development programs. And it is designed to look at the individual. So someone enrolls, we give them assessment tests. That's how I know, frankly, what the big problem is, is because I hate to tell you this, but I'm in LA. So, but we give them something called a COSIS test and it tests their math and reading comprehension. And generally, it's not high, they're not high. But I mean, you know, people that are struggling, it goes back to the education. And there's a whole, you know, we can have a long discussion about that, but in any case, it's very individualized. So, and then there's a career coach assigned and they work with them to figure out the best path forward. And the goal is always as high a paying job as possible. But, you know, there are limitations because we have limited funding. You know, we don't fund for, we don't fund even for an associate's degree, we fund for vocational training. But, you know, the fastest path, which is I think what the rapid re-skilling here is trying to do is actually tech. But you have to have the aptitude to, and there's a lot of programs that test that aptitude, you know, because you wanna set someone up for success. But I would say we try very much to work with the individual. And so we start with the assessment tests. Yeah, thank you for that background on the cost assessment. That's a California standard. There are probably other states that have different standards by which you do that initial assessment and then put on a pathway depending on, you know, ability to that nature. And as we look at the individual, we also, it's not about the individual sometimes, it's about the family. We have people who actually have a life to have, you know, husbands, wives, children, parents are taking care of us, caregivers. Looking right now, COVID-19 has definitely created additional barriers for employment. It's kind of reshaped the labor market. But what are your thoughts on the resources that are needed to support workers and their families in the current labor market? Well, I'll start on this one. Actually, what I want to thank for mentioning WIOA, which, so when WIOA was passed, I was actually working at the USA. And I led the comment period for the organization on that. And so I will concede that WIOA was stepping in the right direction, but 100% is still based on this idea that our job is just to give people a job. And if we just give people a job and they have worked hard and have gumption, then by golly, they'll rise to the top. That was ever true for people who aren't straight white men. It hasn't been true for anyone in my lifetime, right? Hard work is necessary, but it's far from sufficient. And again, going back to that idea we did that in three months, it's crazy. What do people need to thrive in jobs? Same thing as all of us at this panel need to thrive in our jobs, right? I need my daughter to be in, to have affordable childcare while I'm working. I need to be able to get to my job via transportation somehow. I need to know that my housing is gonna be stable, right? And none of these are things that WIOA talks about. Even though we all know, we all know from our own lives, these are things about which we could not be successful. And going back to Jamiro's really good plan about hierarchy of needs, if we can't be successful with those things, people who are suffering because they didn't finish high school because they've never had stable housing because they're working three jobs just to pay for a room in an apartment. We can't ask them to also be like, oh, in addition, we just have some gumption and take two years to get training if we're not gonna provide those supports. I couldn't agree more. What we have found at least that reach, the biggest, one of the biggest reasons people don't complete training or complete school is just life gets in the way. It's incredibly hard to be able to manage completing coursework or some form of education while also having a family and having to work because most people cannot take the time off of work, right? Like they need to be able to generate some form of money to maintain their lifestyle. And so without having that type of wraparound support, it's incredibly difficult to be able to do it yourself. The idea that people are going, this kind of concept of the college student is the person that goes to a residential school for four years, is 18 to 24 year old, that is long gone. And that's actually the minority of college students these days. The majority of college students are often adults working, half children, and that means we have to rethink the ecosystem of supports. They don't really care about the fancy swimming pool that the school have. They need childcare. They need the ability to learn and to earn. And so we know that it's a lot more than like Andre says, hardworking gumption because that only goes so far. There's so much else that that gets in the way. Yeah, I'll use an example that really frustrated me. I lived in a community with two fantastic technical colleges and they were primarily wheel of funded. A lot of the participants that went into those colleges. And the challenges is their average age was 28 and a half. And yet their school, for those programs, I said you can get an advanced manufacturing certification in 12 months, but you have to go to school from eight to four every day, Monday through Friday. How are you gonna make a living and be able to pay your bills for those 12 months while you're trying to get your education? And so the idea of a community college where I can do some online, I can do some at night, that's enticing, but that's typically on an effort to either get a specific certification or to your degree versus a specific, like I'm gonna get a plumber certification or in the technical trades, where we know that there's incredible opportunities to make a really good living, but to get through those programs, it felt nearly impossible for most of the individuals we were talking to, because they couldn't make a living. Yeah, so I would say that that is true about community colleges. They have, it goes back to incentive. So they were only incentivized to give education. They didn't really need care about the outcome. At least I can speak with our partners. And there was a change a few years back where they are now being held accountable for outcomes, for jobs. And so all of this education, they didn't really, they were not responsive at all, in my opinion to their clients and their clients' needs, the times of classes, the variety of options. The private sector has been more, more responsive. And I will say that if there are any gifts from the pandemic, one of them is that there had to be a shift to online, to online training and online education. And this is certainly all the private training providers that we work with have done that. The community colleges are struggling a little bit in that area, but still, I would agree that, again, it's what you're going to send to, you get your reward more, when you reward, you get more of whatever your reward. And they were rewarded simply for saying, here's your certificate, see you later. Yeah, definitely. And as we look at some of these programs that are set in, how can the revolutionist policy in grant programs, such as we all, to remove some of those barriers? Go ahead, Audrey. So I think the first thing is, again, we have to stop the final success in three month terms, right? Because as long as we are able to solve it and provide this to the final success as, I think too much of the government may have a job, we're going to do a couple of things. One, to catch quick, if we're going to summarize it, one thing for workforce model programs to do is to work with people who need the least amount of help, which may be a good way to maximize your scores, but isn't actually what society wants. And also, that's a good way to maintain a status quo, by which the poor stay poor, they may be less poor, but since we're incentivizing them just to get a job in the, you know, they're still as they poor, right? So to catch a good report on the syndromes mattering, I think workforce model has got all the wrong incentives, right? And so one of the reasons I'm really glad to be working with you in the next process is because I think one of the ways that changes is by changing the nature of training. So that training isn't this burdensome thing that only people who only need a little bit of help can do, because they have other basic needs met, but it's something that is just part of everyone's existence because we've made it less onerous. But as long as we are still thinking in terms of our jobs to get people's jobs as clearly as possible, we're responding to the wrong incentives as a second. Well, we've innovated quite a bit with pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs that are longer and something called OJT, which is on the job training. And those provide ramps to, they may not be $50 an hour jobs, but they're $25 an hour jobs. And then we are incentivized to focus on areas where there's career pathways. So yeah, because again, we can only do so much and we have this much funding per person kind of thing. So yeah, if we had $100,000, we could do a lot more, but we are limited to just a few thousand dollars per person. So yeah, I mean, I think the pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship model is really the way to go for trades and even for tech. I mean, there's some very, very successful programs that provide an on-ramp into tech. And as most of you know, Google doesn't care as much about degrees, frankly. They care about skills. And a lot of the interviews at tech companies are skills-based. So it's great, but not everyone can do that. So you've got to craft something for the individual. Yeah. Monica, you were mentioning just innovations and programs like WIOA. And I think that the initial innovation that happened with WIOA was a big step forward from WIOA. And there was a lot of language in there about, you know, we say mandated partners, but there were the forcing partnerships and at least collaboration to some degree. But we are still, I mean, we're eight years since WIOA passed, seven years since WIOA passed. And we're still now, as we're going through real authorization, there are a lot of things that needed to be changed. And we're just now getting to that point where we're starting to realize where WIOA came up short. One of the statistics that I learned from a former head of DOL had mentioned that in one of the areas that they were looking at, but was not something that needed to be reported by those that are receiving WIOA funds was for all the training dollars that was spent in the United States using WIOA training dollars, only about 30% of those individuals went into a job related to the area of training that we paid for. That's a significant disservice for an individual that we essentially just paid three, four, $5,000 on to go get a certification or get a degree. And then, but because we need to make sure they get a job after they finish that program and we need to make sure that their second and fourth quarter exit, you know, wages are up, we need to make sure that we get them to whatever job we could find in that moment. And that's a huge disservice to individuals and something that we have to continuously look at to make sure that if we're gonna spend this money, federal money on training, then we need to make sure that it's towards a pathway towards a good paying job that needs those individuals now. And so that's one example, there are many examples where WIOA did not go far enough that need to be worked out in the reauthorization. Well, I will tell you why that is though, because at least in California, I can't speak everywhere, but there is an extension of UI benefits for training. So again, you get more of whatever you reward. So they were, so folks were being rewarded for asking for training because they wanted an extension. They were really, they frankly, they weren't that interested in training. They weren't, I'm just reporting. So- That day was pretty pandemic. This is pre-numbers. Yes, yes, that is true. That is true. But the second thing is that the way WIOA is structured, it's customer choice. So we deal with this all the time. So there's always a tension between, we have all the data, right? Okay, these trainings are gonna result in a job. You're gonna be really good to go with this training. You take a, everyone loves project management for some reason, or HR certificate or whatever. But we have to do that. We say, here's the data, might not result in a job, but we will do this. We will pay for this training. So we pay for training. We don't, we try to discourage it, but we do pay for training. We know that is not, there will be a, if there's an outcome of a job, it will likely be non-training related. That's one thing that the skillings trying to do with our placement is making sure that those who are trained in a specific discipline are actually placed in jobs, pertaining to the actual training that they receive. Cause we fully understand and identify that quite often people get a training for one thing and even a job is something totally unrelated. And even for those degrees, same thing happens. You gotta college and what? You can't find a job in your degree programs. You just start working somewhere anywhere. But the same type of thing, no matter what level you're on. I believe, Andre, you're about to unmute. Yeah, I just, just making that very point, which is that, as we think about what kind of things we wanna push for in an international wheel, we're coming at this and you know, I'm gonna jokingly say radical position that low income job seekers are just like everyone else. And you know, I have my degrees or in public science psychology. So I came out of college with no job, with no career path, I don't know. I don't think I will do, right? But I didn't have a three months deadline, right? Like I didn't have to be in my field in three months or people are gonna lose funding, right? My college didn't care how long it took me to figure it out. I did eventually figure it out, but my college got paid in advance. They didn't care how long it took me. And so when we think about like, what does it take to have a, to have, you know, low income workers find economic success, I'm always struck by why we seem to act and think is it's not different than what it takes for middle income and high income workers to find job success, right? They may need more help because they didn't get the same orientation, but they don't need anything fundamentally different than we need. But we always seem to, we are, and again, it's a criminal we are, but it's still, as they do, right? We're still from the place like, these people are fundamentally broken, right? We have to fix them as opposed to, they didn't get the support they needed. What are you supposed to need, how do we get it to? I, so I, I totally agree. And I, you know, I studied political science. I do venture capital. Those two don't connect at all, but the reason I'm able to do what I do is because I went to a school that gave me an alumni network and access to resources. Like quite frankly, most people don't have. And so I think we're putting a lot of pressure on a program like we owe it to solve all of those problems. It's not going to, like, you know, we can say like what grant funding, what philanthropy do we need? None of those resources alone are going to solve a lot of the fundamental societal issues that we have. The reality is that even if we give people the best training in the world, and we can say that tech and fliers don't care about degrees, but 75% of those resumes get screened out of the ATS, right? And before anyone even gets to see it. And so the, like the reality is there's so many more societal problems that we have to address beyond just the training. And let's say that resume gets through the ATS, someone screens it, then you have to go into an interview that probably has some form of unconscious bias or conscious bias as they're interviewing you. And so, and that's just assuming that you get to the point of even interviewing the person. We're not talking about everything else that can happen that can get in the way. Like you don't make it to the interview because you don't have childcare or you don't make it in the interview because your grandparent or your parent is sick and therefore you have to take care of them. There is so much about the world that gets in the way that putting so much pressure on a program like we owe is not going to fix it. There are much more underlying issues that you have to address to ensure systematic change. Jamire, with that, ensuring systematic change. Are there any types of partnerships or collaboratives or collectives that you've seen working that meets the needs? So they have that wraparound care and support to be able to go out and pursue those career opportunities? You know, there isn't kind of one that comes to mind and I'm like, this is, you know, the silver bullet but I would say the programs that I have found to be more successful are ones that try to account for all of those things, like I said, that life gets in the way. So maybe they have a learn and earn program. So you're doing a training and you can also earn money while doing it. Maybe they help you with interview prep. Maybe they help you with setting up your resume. Maybe they already have employer partners that you can meet with before you even graduate. It's usually programs that are far more thoughtful about putting together all those types of supports. But as a reminder, that's expensive. And so where does that money come from? And so you can go the nonprofit route where you're raising it in piecemeal ways. You can go the for-profit route, which then you're incentivized to grow, grow, grow and as cheaply as possible. And so it's just, it's challenging because you're trying to build something that we know is very, very expensive. And what you're effectively doing is trying to overcome from the lack of a social safety not that we have in this country, right? Like being able, you're addressing something that quite frankly individual programs should not be addressing. Monica, I saw kind of a cool program, I don't wanna say program, but a company, a manufacturer in Florida that I've always been quite impressed by. They put family first, they have about 4,500 employees. And one of the things that they did from a benefit standpoint, first and foremost is during that offer period, let's say you're gonna be an assembly line worker. And let's say that pay was $12 an hour, but then you had all of these benefits and usually they try to sell the benefits, right? Like they're gonna get healthcare and you can get all these things. Well, what they would do is they would do an Alucard for that employee and they would put a dollar amount, a monetary amount to each employee benefit. And they will say, hey, if you need healthcare, then go ahead and check healthcare. But if you don't need it, then that could equate to about $2.30 more an hour. And they did that with childcare. They opened up a childcare facility on site. And one thing that was cool about the childcare facility it actually ran in hours that were, you know, started at like three in the morning or four in the morning and ran until like eight at night or nine at night because they knew they had, you know, first, second and third shifts and they were trying to cover those individuals with those needs. And so what ends up happening is if I have a significant other that has healthcare and I'm on her plan, then instead of me just declining the healthcare, I actually get more an hour, which can help my family. And that was, so from a benefit standpoint they did a really cool thing. In terms of training, what they realized was we have the experts where, you know, we're struggling to get a tool and die, you know, person. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna create that apprenticeship program, but we didn't partner with our technical colleges or community college. We're gonna do the training inside. And then they partnered with the workforce development board who then added them to their eligible training provider list to pay for essentially their own employees to go through training and get those certifications. So they were really thinking outside the box and trying to figure out like, how do we help people upscale? How do we help serve those needs of our employees because we know they need childcare? And then they had bus routes, their own buses that they had bus routes to go grab people that were 40 minutes away, two times a day, you know, things like that. And they did that because they needed a workforce first all because production is down when you don't have people to actually do the work. So they recognized that that was a need. And then two, they felt like it was part of their goodwill. Again, their mission was family first and then profit second. And so I've always been impressed of kind of that holistic view of the employee even for what some would consider a lower paying skilled job. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Limey. Anybody just wanna chime in on that? I feel a lot about how, and it's not quite clear when it happened. I'm gonna guess the 80s, I guess the 80s, these things. But somewhere online, companies stopped thinking that their employee, that training people to work in their offices with their job, right? Somehow that became a public responsibility. But we know that when companies do that, when companies do say, hey, we want the best people we can get and we know we need, so we'll make the best we can get. That works and they profit and they thrive. So, you know, Jamiro is dead on that a lot of the work that we are trying to do is compensate that someone on the line society decided that low income workers wasn't our problem. And to see kind of change what we need to see, yes, we need to talk about training. Training is again vital and necessary and making that training efficient. Making that training quick, making that training part of every worker's experience, especially in a world where, you know, most of the jobs that currently exist won't in 30 years. Like if you're in a workforce now, the needs or rescills is just a part of your life. But we cannot, we cannot do that in a backdrop that doesn't talk about the need for a better, more robust, safety net for workers. Thank you, Andre. Katherine, did you have anything to give in that one? Well, I would just say that, again, we're on the ground here, so I'm just gonna tell it like it is. You know, there's been great debate on the national level, whether the unemployment benefits and the federal upcharge work was responsible for folks staying at home. And I can tell you that we hear that all the time, all the time, so that so many of our clients were like, I'm riding this out. I'm gonna wait until, and so, you know, we're wondering what's gonna happen in September because 2.2 million workers in California are no longer now on unemployment. So we're starting to see an uptick in enrollments, but again, it goes back to the initial question. It's incentives. So if you pay people to stay home, they will stay home. They're not gonna argue with you. They'll stay home. I personally don't think that's in their best interest. So I think work is valuable. I think it gives dignity to people, it gives them community, it gives them structure. So I'm one to support employers like Chris mentioned, you know, that are thinking outside the box and I'm doing everything they can to develop their employees holistically. Yeah. So, Kat, I reminded that in California, they did a study that said that the occupation that most disproportionately died of COVID was line cook. So when I hear about people not wanting to work to the area of issue benefits, I remember the people who disproportionately died of COVID are people who had low income, low wage jobs for the pandemic. And frankly, I can't blame people for not wanting to work at jobs they might die and the result is that they're still gonna be poor. Andre, that was, I had that conversation with someone that helps the hospitality industry earlier and we were talking specifically about the fact that there have been states that had ended the unemployment benefits, the extended unemployment benefits months ago and the data did not show that they went back to work. That was first and foremost so far. And so we were having that conversation and then also this negative narrative that people are essentially lazy because they don't wanna go back to work. Well, I'm gonna be honest with you, if I made $30,000 a year and now unemployment's $40,000 a year to do that, plus my kids can't go to school. So I need to stay with my kids at home. I'm gonna choose spending time with my kids and get paid a little extra in the meantime because I can help them emotionally, educationally, go through what has been a pretty crappy couple of years. And so that's been kind of a negative narrative. Yes, there's always individuals out there that are gonna take advantage of the system that it's never gonna change, but it's really a small population if you were to look at those numbers. And as unemployment benefits and obviously there's gonna be an uptick of people going back to work because they need to, but I don't think it's gonna happen as quickly as all of us anticipated to happen. One of the things that we're noticing is not all industries were affected last year. Let's be honest, some industries boomed during the pandemic. And what ended up happening is, especially in a dual household income, one person could have actually done really well. They may have got a new job that paid a lot more money. And so that significant other might choose, I think I'm gonna go back to school or I'm gonna stay home with the kids or I'm gonna name whatever that other issue is and they just may not return back. And I think that's what is still to be seen over the next six months or so as individuals. I mean, I know for myself, I reevaluated my life a lot in 2020. I was at home and I had a lot of time to do so. And so I think a lot of people did that and they're still in that process. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Laney. We have about 10 minutes left before we move into Q&A. And with that, I know we've talked about reskilling but like technology, we're also about technology is taking jobs, but what can technology do to overcome barriers for opportunities, for training, for the workforce of tomorrow? Yeah, can I start on the technology component? A few years ago, we talked a lot about automation and how it was gonna create millions of displaced workers and how important it was to just keep that in mind and how we're gonna reskill these individuals. Well, now the conversation has shifted to companies need automation just to keep up with the demand of productivity. And so they don't have enough workers as is. I mean, especially in the lower skilled, Andre, not using those skills that more people may have, we talk about retail, whether it's food service, they need automation just to keep up or we're gonna keep waiting an hour at a restaurant for a meal, to be honest with you. What happens is it's those individuals that typically would take those jobs because they have some of those skills, we need to make sure that they earn and learn new skills to be able to take on the jobs that maybe automation isn't as quickly replacing. And when we look at those hospitality, the skills that you learn in hospitality are the same skills that IT and finance are saying are difficult to find individuals with, customer service specifically. And so we need to take those skills, add onto those skills, but automation still needs to come in and help us with the productivity of those lower wage jobs. That's more of a, you know, personal thought. Thank you, Jamiro, do you have anything you'd like to contribute to that point? Yeah, you know, I actually, I think we have had a long history of using this kind of scare tactics around language of automation is gonna come and take away jobs. And we've used that throughout history, right? We're very, very good at predicting what jobs we're gonna lose. We're very, very awful at predicting what jobs are going to come. A lot of folks, when the rise of ATM started, everyone said there will be no bank tellers. Like bank tellers are going to be non-existent. That did not happen. Because what happened is we gave bank tellers a different job, we gave them different tasks. They didn't, you didn't actually need a person giving people cash to another person. And so in general, I think like there is a lot of good stuff that's coming through automation. Like humans should not be sitting in a truck for hours on days, like driving for one place to another. Obviously there's a benefit of having some income that generates from that, but like that's not something humans should do. And so my like general thoughts are that like, we like to say automation is awful. And yes, there are implications to automation that are bad, but in general, it's good for the advancement of society. The question then is exactly what Dr. Laney said is how do we prepare ourselves for that and ensure that we can help with the transition to these new types of jobs that will become available? And how do we then pinpoint and identify those underlying skills like customer service, like the innate human skills that people have and build upon those to be able to transition people into jobs? That's really kind of the key question that we have to answer. Yeah, thank you Catherine. Yeah, I would agree with Tamara. I hope I'm pronouncing your name properly, but I would agree with her that we've been very proud. Every time there is new technology, we always say, oh my gosh, this is gonna just play so many folks, but there's always jobs that replace it, always. And every single revolution if you will, industrial revolution. And I would disagree with Tamara and I'm not sure we can state exactly what those will be. I don't know. So for example, self-driving trucks. First of all, truck riding is really a godsend particularly for people with backgrounds. We have a lot of contracts for folks, reentry folks. And it's a challenge, particularly if they have something like a sex offense. So anyway, I hope we don't lose truck riding altogether because it is a very good job for certain individuals. And I would hate that to go away. But let's say it looks like it will go completely automated well, then there's jobs that behind the scenes for the truck driving automation technology, right? Goes back to training people in tech. Again, I'm a big believer in pre-apprenticeships and apprenticeships on ramps into those fields. So yeah, I think, yeah, we're in a big shift. There's a lot of things that are changing. And I think it's kind of hard to predict though. Thank you. And Andre, to wrap up before we move into Q and A, I'd love to hear your feedback. Sure. So I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but those $29 million driving jobs in America are gone. If not in the next five years or in the next 20. It's funny, I know that 80% according to studies surveys 80% of Americans think they're a driver, which is mathematically impossible. But the fact of the matter is that in the next five to 10 years, if not already, self-driving cars lead better drivers than humans. And Jamiah is 100% right. That's not a bad thing. My father was a trucker, so I'm not been telling you the trucking industry, but human beings weren't made to sit in this kind of cab for 18 hours a day. That is not a good way to live a life, right? It's like when people talk about wanting cold jobs back and you're like, no, those jobs were literally, those jobs literally killed your grandparents. So like, yeah, if we can automate away bad jobs, that is a good thing. The challenge of for us as a society is to make sure that good jobs, which there will always be a need for, that none of us will live to see a day where there are things that humans won't do other machines, including taking care of machines. So there'll always be good jobs. We make sure those jobs are available to everyone. And we got to make sure that the benefits of automation and the benefits of the rural technology improving, actually do improve in life span and lifestyle, which means making sure the benefits of automation are distributed more equitably. And that's a policy, it's only a policy conversation we need to have as a society is, what does it mean to have a world of widespread automation and how do we make sure that those benefits don't just fund private space shifts for billionaires, right? Like how do we ensure that everyone benefits from the fact that I think, you know, Amazon for example, does great work. And Jeff Bezos deserves to be rich for the work he did. But how do we have a society in which we all benefit from those kinds of things? Because whether we like it or not, those jobs are going away. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for that, Andre. And with that, we do have about 15 minutes for Q and A. I know that we have a nice number of questions in the Q and A as well as in the chat. And Bri has been monitoring and she'll be able to bring some of those questions up for you guys. And once again, whomever has the first answer, please do chime in. But please know that Jamira does have to jump off. So she may be able to get in one question, but if you don't see her in about five minutes, she does have to jump off for another engagement. But thank you so much for joining us and giving your time and your great insight and expertise into our first development, the future of work and how we can revolutionize it. Alrighty, Bri. So what is the first question that you have? Yes, thank you everyone for all your engaging questions. If you do have any questions, please place them in the Q and A box to ensure that they're addressed and answered. And that way, all of our attendees can see your question. So the first one is what would be the correlation between the Great Resignation and reskilling? What's the effect of the Great Resignation reskilling at enterprises? I'd like to ask this question to all panelists. I think obviously there's an article, a new article every day about the Great Resignation. And I wanna go back to something I said earlier that I think it comes from a workforce that is just dissatisfied for status quo. And they had 2020 to start thinking about what do I wanna do next? What do I wanna think differently? We started to hear the terminology, I want a COVID proof job, whatever that was, right? And so I think it really comes down to individuals really honing in on what do I want out of my life? How can it look differently? And I think part of that is, partly because of remote work too, I can get a job anywhere. So maybe I start to reconsider working in a different industry. I have some skills and someone's gonna pay me $5 more an hour and I can work from in my house. I think a lot of people started to evaluate just who they are, what do they want out of life? I wanna spend more time at home. So I'm not gonna no longer do 70 hour work weeks because I actually enjoy being around my family a little more because I was stuck indoors with them. Like there's a lot of those things that people were asking. And so I think the great resignation personally is a lot around people just reevaluating their lives and what they want out of it. Yeah, I'd echo that. I think even when you look at say lower pain positions, the one I feel about is servers and restaurants, right? So restaurants closed for six months last year, even in the best of places, right? And so the whole people who were making the tipman when wage had to find other work. And they did, you know that other work was other low paying jobs. It was other low paying jobs that weren't tipman when wage, right? So like you get a steady wage with steady hours going back to being a server, so a lot of people just didn't seem appealing at that point, right? And why would it, right? And so I think what we're seeing here, I think I said this earlier, is a job market where a lot of people for health reasons, for financial reasons, for family reasons, don't feel a need to take whatever crumbs they get thrown. And when I studied economics, what I heard was that when supply and his five employees goes down, the price of that work goes up and we haven't seen it yet for employers but I think we're gonna have to. Again, I'm in LA, but no, there's real wage inflation. I mean, it's across the board. And again, it's my experience. I can find data that supports it, but I'm not here to argue about it, but I will tell you that it was approximately, they were, a lot of folks were getting the equivalent of about $17 an hour staying home. So they wouldn't, again, this is dozens of people telling us this. They wouldn't take a job. They wouldn't take a job unless, they might take a job for 20, definitely 25. So if employers were desperate, they had to pay more. And some of them got clever with bonuses and incentives so that moving forward, it wasn't necessarily baked in to their business model because the business models, some of them aren't, they don't have a lot of margins. But anyway, so yeah, we were seeing a lot of wage inflation. We're hiring, we've raised our pay across the board because there's a wage inflation. And you can argue that's a good thing. We'll see how it all pans out. I don't yet know, frankly. But regarding the great resignation, I fully agree that a lot of people took this time to say, what do I really, really want out of life? But I think they had the luxury of doing that as well. So a lot of folks, so yeah. Thank you, thank you all. So our next question is from a competitor perspective from one of the teams that's competing in the competition currently. Would you please address workforce challenges with aging populations who do not have technology skills and self-esteem to enter into entry-level jobs requiring those minimum technology acumen? So this is a very big deal. I mean, okay. So we're on the west side of LA. It is upper income in general, but there's a lot of pockets of poverty. There's no shortage of folks that qualify for Iowa in the low income and certainly the low-skilled categories. But I think our last year and years data, it's something like 45% of folks of our clients, we have about 1200 clients are over the age of 45. So while there's 10 million people in LA, there's a lot of people, but the older folks are having actually more challenges. And I will tell you why. What we see, again, this is what we see. We have employers, they're not discriminating against race. They're not discriminating against sexual orientation. They're not discriminating against gender. They're discriminating against age. And quietly, they'll say so, even though it's against the law because they can get away with it. No one talks about it, no one seems to care. So we have, for some reason, I think women, maybe because they're more vocal, I don't know, but I see women in my office are used to before the pandemic every week, 45 and up. They might even have an MBA, it doesn't matter. No one wants to hire them. And it's heartbreaking because you think how, what do I do to help this person? And technical skills, I mean, we do things like a very intensive Microsoft Office class. We try to fill that gap. But honestly, it's very difficult because it goes beyond just Microsoft Office, right? It's the ability to learn a new app. How do you teach that? I don't even know how to teach that. Employers rightly look at people that are younger and think they're gonna be much more agile, right? Again, it's a very hard problem and nobody wants to talk about it. Thank you, Catherine. Chris Andre would love your perspective on that. They don't want to talk about it. No, I think there's, I think there's a lot there. I think, I love Mr. I think, certainly it is hard to ask more senior workers, especially with more senior workers who've had better paying jobs to take two years to learn a new skill. But I think that's part of the value of things like what we're doing here with X Prizes. It's a much different beast to ask them to take 10 weeks part of time while they're still working to learn new skills. Again, I think we have to assume that going forward that's gonna be part of every worker's experience is they're gonna have to learn new skills. Right. Right. To my bio that I had some background opinions like what is this been five years of my 20s as doing IT for small businesses and nonprofits. And I remember what my boss used to say was that we're in a stony computing, right? And that this was already part of the century. He's like, you know 20 years now we've got people that's gonna say used to do what with computers. And he's right. But I think that's just the nature of the beast for the foreseeable future is that tech is gonna change at a really rapid pace. And it is just part of everyone's career path is gonna have to be learning new skills on the fly. Right now that's hard to do, which is why I think X Prizes exists because they have to be easier especially for more advanced workers. Yeah, I just think this is kind of a more it's a difficult topic, but to take Katnit and Andre's point, I mean, you have to learn skills. And I think it's gonna get easier a bit easier over time because I think that those that are, you know not in the retiree age maybe, you know in your 40s, 50s, 60s, they've had to learn a lot of new skills just in general, just to communicate. I mean, in my early career, I worked at Verizon Wireless when we had a Trio 600 and that was it. And no everybody told me they will never have a device to make phone calls with a screen on it. And that was 15 years ago. Now I sometimes go to like my in-laws to ask them a question about how'd you figure that out on your iPhone? Like because I haven't figured it out yet. So I think that technology has changed so rapidly and I think a lot of people have adapted. And last year, we know data-wise and we had this in our demographic drought research that we released a few months ago that last year we had more than 2 million additional baby boomers retire out of the workforce because they liked going into work and seeing people. So on average, we had about 2 million people that would retire over the last five years baby boomers retire. And last year it turned into close to 4 million. Well, that's because they liked the camaraderie going into the office, talking to people. They learned some skills. And when they got stuck at home, they were like, well, nevermind, I'm out. Like I'm just going to retire. And I think that over time, it's going to get a little bit easier but you just have to have this mindset. I'm going to have to learn a new skill. And to Andre's point, you know, it is difficult for someone to have made, that's made a good living that is going to go into a job where you got to learn a new skill and you're going to get paid a lot less. That is a difficult position. I know even in my own family, my father who did retire, making good money as an auto mechanic decided he didn't want to be stuck at home anymore and went back into a grocery store and started working just to give him something to do. But he really enjoys it. And it's something different. He works with people every day. And that's not everybody, you know? So it's going to be an interesting five, 10 years. I would say there is a dramatic need. And I'm sure someone will do this if they're not already for both mature workers and certainly low income folks. There's a digital divide. Some people still don't have internet in their homes. They might have phones, but they have limited plans. So they're not very technically savvy. So if there was some program that could, it's not just office, right? You have to know how to work a phone. You have to know how to learn an app. There's a variety of skills that employers kind of expect. It's kind of like reading or writing. Like you have to be able to do this. And there's no training provider that I know of that actually fills that need. Yeah, pretty much it's digital literacy, which sometimes it's like one of the components of adults basic education before you get into those ABE or high set programs. And looking at that, there's another question from a competitive perspective in regards to incentivizing because digital literacy can be something that's a soft skill that's built into an actual solution or retraining experience. And the question is, well, first of all, I said, thank you for your insider incentives. But could you please speak a little bit more about incentives post-training and what could be done to motivate individuals to submit their resume, show up for interviews and so on and so forth. And also, what prevents an individual from actively participating in job search, post-training and the relevant field that they've been trained in? Well, I think one of them has answer, which is there's still a very real digital divide, right? In Massachusetts, we found that in low income communities, something like 25% of residents don't have internet access and in the world where you spread it to job lots online and sometimes, you know, do the, actually apply for that online, that's basically kind of how that provides you in general and as someone mentioned in the comments, that's probably not even worse for your immigrant and other uncertain communities. And as far as like, how do you incentivize people to go through with it? Well, one of the things, again, is that we need to figure out ways to get, and I say this as a leader of fundamental collaborative, and so we're gonna do this with our tiny bit of money, but ultimately speaking, we've got to convince the feds to do a much larger part of our personal money. We got to invest more in services post-graduation so that we still can work with people post-graduation because I don't think it's that people don't want to submit resumes, right? Although there's some of that, any of us who've job-hunted recently can tell you, job-hunting isn't fun. And, you know, it gets depressing to submit resume after resume and you hear nothing, right? So like, motivation is hard for all of us, but what we can do is if we're still working with people, if we're still that sense of community, which we know is central to keeping these programs going is that they feel like someone's in their corner, that'll help, right? Again, money always helps, right? Like, I'm not gonna say that, like we should consider how to pay people to job-hunt, but ultimately speaking, the process is terrible and we gotta figure out ways to make it less terrible for people. I agree. Blessing, alphabetical order, go Chris. I was just gonna say, I agree. The job-hunting process and application process, and it's horrendous. And in some cases, playing for one job because every single company would have a different HRIS system with some sort of applicant tracking system. So therefore, you have to put in the same information that could take you 30 minutes, 45 minutes, you know, just to get to the point where you actually upload your resume at the end and then send it off and then to Andre's point, then no one ever responds to you. I saw one company over the last year that I was really impressed with in the fact that they actually updated you on where your resume was in the entire process, uploaded. Someone reviewed your resume and they like click it in their system and that sent you a notification. Someone actually looked at it. Someone, you know, whatever it is in that process, you actually got a notification. I thought that was really cool and transparent and I wish more employers would do that, but it really is just a horrible process right now and it's a disincentive to apply for jobs. One other point I will make is we do also, I'm a big believer in this, especially in the tech space, we need to stop making people work for free. And I think that it's an unfair advantage when, you know, you say, hey, you're applying for, let's say, a graphic design or a multi-media design. Can you please go ahead and make me, you know, a strategic plan, a three-minute video, and also rebrand my whole company for free and then we'll consider you for the job. And there's no compensation for it and it's for that person to try to get that job. I think that it's an injustice, honestly, to those people in those occupations. Thank you and Catherine, we're gonna give it about two minutes as we're getting close to time to wrap up Q&A. We have two more questions we need to- I was just gonna say, a lot of times it's the relationship between the training and the marketplace. So there's a whole lot of things that employers will not hire you unless you have experience. So a good example is medical coding and billing. People love it because they tend to start it like 25 or 30 or something. However, if that person or people are responsible for the revenue for whether it's a hospital or a clinic or a dental office, so they want people with experience. So again, it goes back, we tell people this and sometimes they don't listen and they go through and it's a very actual, arduous training and they don't get a job. So again, that's why I believe so strongly in apprenticeships or pre-apprenticeships because you have the training and then you have the employer right there. We have developed actually a consortium where the employer will actually develop the training and is at the end waiting to hire. JBS has actually done that. That's the best model. So that the person isn't left like, okay, what do I do? The other thing that we've done is we had a, it went on pause during the pandemic, but we had a working group of folks that would come every week and just it was like a support group for job searchers. So people, we are communal animals. So it was very hopeful because people could talk about what job words they liked and then give each other job leads. It was quite good, but anyway, a couple points, that's all. Yeah, thank you, Catherine. I know Marie, there was one other question in the Q and A. Yes, it seems like we have time for one more question. Again, thank you for all of our attendees. Made a question, hopefully we'll have space so we can continue the conversation offline following this immersive discussion. I actually kind of want to kick the ball back to you, Monica, and see which question you want to leave with. We talked about the relationship with companies and their employers. But there's also a question at the chat about where we're at with COVID and our minimum wage jobs with inclusive costs such as healthcare, healthcare, transportation, et cetera, even possible. So if you want to leave with that, Monica, I think that might be the best place to end for today. I was on mute. And I felt like that kind of ties back into the example that Chris gave about the Florida company that was actually tying all those things into their model about putting family first. So that could be something that we reiterate on in regards to the answer to that question. I think it depends on the industry, to be honest with you. I mean, like I said, there's some industries that are booming that the pandemic actually, helped them out tremendously because of the work that they did and other industries that were just decimated. And so those industries are just in the early stages of trying to figure out, how do we just get workers back? And in addition to trying to pay them, maybe even a better wage, we call it, when we see a spike in wages, we do call it wage inflation. And then I know that someone had mentioned in the chat that it's good because wages are finally just going up. But we don't disagree with that. But when you have a 30% jump in a specific occupation or industry, within a month, that typically means there's some sort of inflation happening. And unfortunately, we did see employers inflate their wages last year in 2020 over the summer. And then as things started opening up and people started going back to work a little bit, they decreased those wages again and went back down. And we see that in our data across the country. And so I think it's really important that I think depending on the industry, a lot of businesses are gonna compete for talent. They're gonna include a lot of different benefits to try to compete for that talent. And other industries are just gonna continue to suffer a bit because they're just trying to make ends meet with getting talent into the door. Yeah, thank you so much for that question. And thank you so much for that answer. Based on that Florida example, I know we're gonna have to wrap up now. So we have time for our wonderful keynote speaker. But I'd like to thank you so much, Andre Green, Catherine McKinney, Dr. Chris Laney for coming on and bringing your expertise, your passion, your voice and your knowledge of the table to be able to share with all of those who are on. And to also give some great value ads to our semifinals teams who are on watching and listening as they get ready to force their new path around two of the competition and into next year as well. Some of the things that you shared, the jewels of knowledge will much so be very much used, taking note of and put into how they plan their strategy for competing moving forward. So thank you so much. And we can move on into pivoting into our keynote speaker. We're very, very excited.